Comment by vidarh

As a Norwegian with passable German, written Dutch feels almost like just jumbling some letters around and adding unnecessary consonants... (Spoken Dutch, though, is entirely incomprehensible to me) The language continuum around the North Sea is fairly tight (more so if you consider Low German instead of standard German so you don't need to deal with the effects of the annoying High German consonant shift (think Dag -> Tag, Schip -> Schiff etc.))