I am a native anglophone and know a bit of German, but have never learned any Dutch. I find Dutch <i>very strange</i> because looking at it or listening to it it feels as if I <i>ought</i> to understand it, but in fact (usually) I mostly don&#x27;t.<p>I guess what triggers the ought-to-understand feeling is that things like letter&#x2F;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.<p>(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&#x27;t trigger that feeling of recognition in the way Dutch does.)