The British military language school in Beaconsfield ranks languages in terms of difficulty using grammar as the primary means of evaluation. Finnish and Hungarian are the most grammatically complex if we discount the little-spoken !kung language of the Kalahari bushmen. Next come languages like Chinese and Thai, where the 5-tone system adds complexity. Russian, VietNamese, Arabic, Farsi, Dari, and Pashtun all rank as more difficult than English. The European family of languages are pretty easy to assimilate sufficiently well within the context of a 12-week course.