English as the hardest European Language (to learn to read)

"The results for English appear grossly different from the other European languages. In the Scottish sample, analysis suggested that two or more years of experience were needed before word identification in English matched the accuracy and fluency levels achieved in the majority of languages before the end of the first school year...

The most extreme disadvantage occurs in English. Although the Scottish grade 1 children were ahead of age expectation, they read only 29% of nonwords correctly and were extremely dysfluent (6.69 sec/item). Grade 2 children, aged 6.56 years, read only 64% of nonwords at a rate of 3.17 sec/item, well below all other languages tested (except for the Danish grade 1 group). Seymour et al. estimated that the reading age needed to match the level of the majority of European languages was above 7.5 years, implying that the English-speaking groups needed 25 years of learning, or more than twice as much time as most other languages, to establish a most minimal and basic decoding function."

--- Early Reading Development in European Orthographies in The Science of Reading: A Handbook / ed Margaret J. Snowling, Charles Hulme