German book recommendation: Robert Mazari -- Leichtes English...

[Doitsujin]

I recently stumbled upon Robert Mazari's book Leichtes Englisch, schwieriges Französisch, kompliziertes Russisch: Evaluation der Schwierigkeiten des Englischen, Deutschen, Französischen, Russischen und Polnischen als Fremdsprache in which he ranks the learning difficulties of English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Polish using his own metrics.
Unfortunately, neither the publisher nor Amazon offers a preview for this interesting book.

Mazari uses the following factors to evaluate the difficulty of a language:

1. Pronunciation (e.g., number of sounds that learners often have problems with)
2. Writing system (e.g., number of letters with diacritics, Cyrillic, phoneme-grapheme relationship etc.)
3. Morphology (e.g., number of verb, noun and adjective endings)
4. Vocabulary (e.g., total number of dictionary entries, cognates etc.)
5. Syntax (e.g., SVO or non-SVO)

Based on his analysis, he ranked the languages as follows:

Polish: 70 points
German: 68 points
Russian: 66 points
French: 53 points
Spanish: 50 points
Italian: 48 points
English: 46 points

I.e., for Germans, the easiest languages would be English, Italian and Spanish.

Here's the summary for Polish:

[Zegpoddle]

So Russian, with its seven cases and a new alphabet to learn and tricky concepts like direction of motion and perfective/imperfective aspects, is easier to learn than German with its four cases, familiar alphabet (for western Europeans), and nothing much harder in its grammar than deferring the verb until the end of a dependent clause? HUH?

Does it even make sense to try to grade the difficulty level of languages in any absolute sense, without taking into account the languages already known to the learner? While I don't think contrastive analysis accounts for all of the reasons someone may struggle to learn another language, I'm suspicious of ranking schemes that discard it entirely. And who is to say that a phonemic difficulty is equal to a syntactic or semantic one? Do two challenging sounds equal three complicated clause structures? Who gets to decide?

I suspect that if you gathered a hundred linguists or language teachers in a room and asked them to rank twenty languages in order of learning difficulty, without reference to the learners' native languages, you would get a hundred different lists.