Dutch is indeed rather similar to English, especially old English. Especially if you, like me, are more sensitive to grammar than vocab when getting a feel for

Dutch is indeed rather similar to English, especially old English. Especially if you, like me, are more sensitive to grammar than vocab when getting a feel for a language. But English vocab is very Frenchified. It's true that the 100 or so most important words in English are still Germanic, and also that all European languages imported tens of thousands of rare, fancy, words from Greek, Latin and French. But I am talking about the middle-space, those few thousands of common-but-not-ubiquitous words that fill a student's vocab list. In most Germanic languages that stuff is still largely Germanic, but in English it is much more mixed.