I agree that it's oddly phrased. Empirically, it is true that if you start from English you can probably learn Spanish more quickly than German, but it doesn't

I agree that it's oddly phrased. Empirically, it is true that if you start from English you can probably learn Spanish more quickly than German, but it doesn't necessarily follow that Spanish is more similar. After all, Spanish doesn't have our weird Germanic modal verbs, rules about how to structure questions, separable prefixes, and so on.