[gjm11]

I am a native anglophone and know a bit of German, but have never learned any Dutch. I find Dutch very strange because looking at it or listening to it it feels as if I ought to understand it, but in fact (usually) I mostly don't.

I guess what triggers the ought-to-understand feeling is that things like letter/n-gram frequencies, word lengths, etc., match English fairly well. A bit like looking at the output of a Markov chain text generator or an RNN trained on English.

(Spanish is, for me, more or less the opposite. Given a page of Spanish text I can generally decode it pretty well, albeit slowly, on the basis of other languages I know -- English native, French fairly well, schoolboy Latin -- but it doesn't trigger that feeling of recognition in the way Dutch does.)