[gyuserbti]

As a native English speaker with Dutch colleagues, I've always thought Dutch was remarkably close. Once you kinda figure out pronunciation patterns a lot of it is very similar. Written Dutch is the only language I intuitively perceive the cognate rrelationships with.

[vanderZwan]

Supposedly we are the second-closest language to English linguistically (I'm not sure by what measure - I'm not a linguist). Only Frisian, which has many similarities to Old English, is closer.