But their stories have been of steady rises through the English ranks.
How long it takes to learn a language does not answer which ones are hard independent of the learner's first language (nor the related question "How hard is English?") Ranking languages on a universal scale of difficulty is itself difficult and controversial.
Generally, new students must have a 3.0 overall numeric grade average (B letter grade; 80 or better percentage grade), have at least a 80% average in both Mathematics and English, rank in the 65th percentile or better among all Maryland students in Math and English on the Maryland School Assessment (MSA), and have 90% or better attendance rate.
More than six decades on, a recent poll for English Heritage ranked the De La Warr Pavilion the country's third best-loved building of the past 100 years.
Moreover, the English sample ranked low on most aspects of life: 14th out of the 16 countries on satisfaction with relationships with teachers and the areas they live in; 13th on their home, the way they look and their school marks; and 12th on family life, the other people in their family and their own body.
The English Baccalaureate ranks secondary schools in England according to the number of pupils who get good GCSEs in English, maths, science, another language and a humanities subject - either geography or history.
As The Atlantic's Max Fisher pointed out, assuming that the term Anglo-Saxon is a "colloquialism for the English people": In the 2000 U.S. census, only 8.7 percent of Americans identify their ancestry as English, which is ranked fourth behind German, Irish, and African-American.
The English golfer Paul Casey, ranked eighth in the world, called the sport "a great leveler, even for a world leader".
"We want you to be different, but not TOO different," one tutor told Which?, a whimsical preoccupation, perhaps, when English teenagers are ranked the world's worst for literacy and not much better at maths.
