How Hard Is It to Learn Dutch?

In any case, the good news for English speakers is that any learner will be coming across familiar words from day one of learning. Not only do a lot of the words have a similar origin and written form (compare water-water, late-laat, heart-hart, name-naam, etc.), some contemporary Dutch is also straight up borrowed from English. Additionally, you probably won’t have too much trouble (with some exceptions that we’ll get to later) speaking the words, since the sound systems of the languages are rather similar, matching even the natural stress and intonation of the language.
Grammatically speaking, Dutch has the same basic sentence structure as English – subject takes the first place, followed by the verb, and object. It’s the adverbials you must look out for since their positions do not at first seem natural to English speakers. In other good news, the verbs themselves function rather similarly as they do in English – verb tenses seem natural, and the verbs do not change to express grammatical functions (they are uninflected).