[thaumasiotes]

> preferably a Romance or Germanic language (as I believe some languages don't have tenses)

A couple of points:

- If you natively speak a Romance language, learning Latin by example is going to be really easy for you. This doesn't belong in a comparison with anything else.

- Germanic speakers have no special advantage over any other Indo-European speakers.

- You might be interested to know that while Mandarin verbs don't inflect for tense, the negative particle does, so you have to observe a distinction between past and present tense whenever you're negating a verb.

我不理解 I don't understand

我没有理解 I didn't understand