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According to the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute, (FSI) Finnish is among the group of languages they consider to be the most difficult for English speakers to learn.
Because Finnish has no connection to Latin or Germanic language groups, it has proven to be more than a mouthful for most English speakers. The 15 grammatical cases in Finnish make it a challenging language to learn as the smallest change in the end of the word can significantly change its meaning. Case endings are added to word stems as suffixes and are used to express the same things that prepositions express in English. The FSI ranks the easiest languages to learn as Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, French, Dutch, Spanish and Romanian.
Finnish American Reporter, July 2013
Because Finnish has no connection to Latin or Germanic language groups, it has proven to be more than a mouthful for most English speakers. The 15 grammatical cases in Finnish make it a challenging language to learn as the smallest change in the end of the word can significantly change its meaning. Case endings are added to word stems as suffixes and are used to express the same things that prepositions express in English. The FSI ranks the easiest languages to learn as Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, French, Dutch, Spanish and Romanian.
Finnish American Reporter, July 2013