An Analysis of the Difficulty of Learning Various Foreign Languages for English speakers – Non-Indo-European Languages

Very long: 101 pages.

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An Analysis of the Difficulty of Learning Various Foreign Languages for English speakers – Non-Indo-European Languages.

From the abstract:

A number of different languages outside of the Indo-European family were analyzed based on how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to learn them. They were then rated on a purely impressionistic 1-6 scale of easiest to most difficult.

Extensive phonological, morphological, syntactic, and even semantic analysis was done for many of these tongues to highlight areas of difficulty for English learners.

Languages include: Hebrew, Japanese, Arabic, Georgian, the Australian Indigenous languages, Malayalam, Pirahã, Khoisan, Vietnamese, Khmer, Estonian, the Algonquian languages, Classical Japanese, the Salish Languages, Amharic, Turkish, Tamil, Swahili, Finnish, Chukchi, Navajo, Hungarian, Malay, Quechua, Inuit, Ingush, Abkhaz, Burushaski, Thai, Tibetan, Korean, Maori, Xhosa, Ojibwa, Somali, Inuktitut, …