Frits van Bommel wrote:

> 
> By the way, I've heard that /Dutch/ is actually one of the hardest languages to learn[3]...

> [3] (as a second language)

Actually, there's a scale for this. I can't recall the name of it, but it ranks languages mostly by group according to several criteria. On one end of the scale are latin- and germanic-based languages. On the other end is Chinese. The closer two languages are to each other the easier it is for speakers of each language to learn the other. The farther apart they are, the more difficult to learn.