English is an unusual case in that English dropped most of its inflection as it transitioned from Old English to Middle English, and then heavily adopted Romance roots (first Norman French for a fair few common terms, then Latin for advanced scientific terms). Thus a native English-speaker already has a greater familiarity with the functional vocabulary of Romance languages than they do with other Germanic languages. Meanwhile, what should have been the grammatical leg-up from being a Germanic language doesn't exist, so the grammatical ease of learning French versus German are going to be roughly equivalent. Although Romance might be somewhat easier, since it's a two-gender system unlike the Germanic three-gender system.
The closest language to English is Frisian, which isn't a variant of Dutch (English and Frisian broke off from West Germanic as Anglo-Frisian, and an Englishman could well pass for Frisian in Medieval times). Dutch broke off at the same time as Anglo-Frisian, and it evolved somewhat towards English and Frisian (particularly in some of the phonology).
As someone whose only competent foreign language is French, I'll point out that Frisian and Dutch are in no way intelligible (although I'm mostly going by written varieties here, and it should be noted that Frisian and Dutch butcher their orthography on the same order that English does). Occasionally, you do come across a sentence in Dutch or Frisian that is completely well-understood, but most of the rest of the text remains fairly impenetrable.
From what I've heard anecdotally, the interesting thing about Dutch is that it seems to unintelligible to English or German monoglots, but English/German bilinguals tend to find it quite easy to understand.
The closest language to English is Frisian, which isn't a variant of Dutch (English and Frisian broke off from West Germanic as Anglo-Frisian, and an Englishman could well pass for Frisian in Medieval times). Dutch broke off at the same time as Anglo-Frisian, and it evolved somewhat towards English and Frisian (particularly in some of the phonology).
As someone whose only competent foreign language is French, I'll point out that Frisian and Dutch are in no way intelligible (although I'm mostly going by written varieties here, and it should be noted that Frisian and Dutch butcher their orthography on the same order that English does). Occasionally, you do come across a sentence in Dutch or Frisian that is completely well-understood, but most of the rest of the text remains fairly impenetrable.
From what I've heard anecdotally, the interesting thing about Dutch is that it seems to unintelligible to English or German monoglots, but English/German bilinguals tend to find it quite easy to understand.