[Cojo]

Now correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't the diffuculty of learning a 2nd language be dictated by the 1st language. For instance, I am a U.S. citizen and I found German to be insanely easy to learn, of course German is one of the major roots of english and thus the word origins and sentance formations are much more similar then say English and French, one being more Germanic and the other a Romance language. Now my understanding of Dutch is that it is the long term result of hundreds of years of intermingling between French and German speaking peoples. One might figure that this would create a most colourful language with origins lying on both sides of an ancient cultural line. This may be the cause of such difficulties in learning the Dutch language, of course I've never tried to learn Dutch so I don't know how hard it is.