[hilbert42]

Thanks for the link it is quite informative. With Spanish at 24 weeks and French at 30 it's probably what I'd expect given the comments of those who've studied Spanish. Similarity, German at 36 weeks is clearly more difficult to learn, and it bears out both my own experience and that of shankr.

Your comment about Norwegian is interesting. I've no knowledge of Norwegian but on more than one occasion I've been watching a subtitled Norwegian movie on TV only to be startled suddenly when I've understood a phrase or two (it's as if the movie had dropped into English for a second or two), clearly quite a number of the words are the same as in English, so too the language's structure.

Re Dutch, I've been in the Netherlands on many occasions and I've found the language has many similarities with German but there are many gotchas too. Many nouns are very similar but some common ones that one would expect to be the same as German are very different. As for pronunciation, that's something that I'd never really attempt (nor was it necessary as so many Dutch spoke excellent English).

Years ago, I had a Dutch girlfriend who came from The Hague. When she was living there she worked in a secretarial capacity for the Dutch Government. She spoke often about the great importance of using correct and very precise Dutch at important levels of government, here correct usage was much more important than the equivalent situation in the anglophone world (the use of correct Dutch is an important indicator of both one's education and status). Incidentally, she spoke impeccable English, so too her German.

PS: Interesting factoid, the Dutch equivalent of the OED, Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, is the largest dictionary in the world (bigger than the OED): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_....