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Although they're "unique" I'm not sure that necessarily makes them harder to learn.

Compare Finnish to a language such as Polish with many cases, and Polish always comes out "harder".

I'm biased as I have moved to Finland, and am (slowly) trying to learn the language. It is hard, but at the same time I'm not sure that learning grammar/words would have been easier if it had been related to another language that I also didn't speak!

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I think the variance among grammars is smaller than variance among vocabularies. Just take any two romance languages. Their grammars will be much more similar than their vocabularies are. This, I think, suggests that a large part of the difficulty involved in learning a new language is actually due to changes in vocabulary. Trying to learn a language with completely different words seems like a Stroop task on steroids.

The FSI rates Finnish as harder than Polish for native English speakers.

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