Nick Maclaren wrote:

In article ,
johannes writes:
| Martin wrote:
|
| The Danes that I have worked with in Holland could guess Dutch to a certain
| extent and learnt it quickly.
|
| The only reason for this is that the Danes learn foreign languages in school
| by necessity of being a small country; English, German, French at least.
| Dutch is as far away from Danish as German. The Danish language belongs to
| the Scandinavian family of languages.

Oh, really! Please do be a little less parochial.

I can make a fair amount of sense of Dutch and some of Danish, despite
never having learnt either language, because of the similarities in
the Germanic languages (including the Scandinavian ones). That is
little help with (say) Polish, none at all with Turkish - and, as for
African, American, Far-Eastern and Australian languages, please get real.

Then you must be a clever dick, of course you are... I have worked with
plenty of nationalities and found the Dutch incomprehensible. Apart from
the odd word which pop up, just like many words becomes americanised. But
the structure of the languages are completely different. Like the Danes,
the Dutch are good foreign language speakers, so you tend to fall into
English when speaking with them.

The whole of the Germanic family is very similar, and the separations
were less than two thousand years ago.

Depends what you mean by similar.