They're also just very phonetically similar languages; as an American who visited Amsterdam, hearing other people having conversations in Dutch was incredibly d

They're also just very phonetically similar languages; as an American who visited Amsterdam, hearing other people having conversations in Dutch was incredibly disorienting, because from a distance it sounded just like American English, except that I would try to focus on their conversation and realize that I didn't understand any of the individual words they were saying! Basically, in my (very limited) experience, a Dutch accent was bizarrely similar to an American accent.