Are French and Italian good languages to start off with?
In regards to Dutch and German, Dutch will be far easier to learn than German. Dutch and Afrikaans are actually English’s closest major relatives– German is still closely related, but more distantly so. What makes German considerably more difficult than Dutch, however, is that it has preserved many linguistic features (such as case) that have been dropped from the other modern Germanic languages. This means that you will encounter many unfamiliar and archaic structures when studying German that wouldn’t be found in English, Dutch, or even Norwegian for that matter. In any event, French is an excellent place to start. Genealogically, French and English are not closely related, but centuries of interaction have produced a high degree of lexical similarity between the two (they share many words in common). Italo-Western languages are also notable because they contain few unfamiliar features which may prove challenging to a learner. There are a handful of Italic verb tenses that are not r
