I've been wondering in the last year or so why it is that I find French easier to learn than German. If English is your native language, and I show you a random page from a book first in French, then in German, I can promise that you will understand more of the French words than the German ones. The French vocabulary seems to be more similar to English than German. Other English speakers I've talked to have echoed this feeling. And yet English is part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family while French is part of the Romance branch. Prima facie, one would think the opposite.
Since the Romance languages are the languages that descended from Latin, and since I've had 4+ years of high school Latin, this might explain the anomaly. But let's suppose this isn't the case. What would be the explanation then? I did a little Internet research and discovered that the reason for this is a consequence of politics and warfare. According to Wikipedia:
Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (pronunciations are not always identical, of course) because English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from French, via the Norman language after the Norman conquest and directly from French in further centuries; as a result, a substantial share of English vocabulary is quite close to the French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings etc.), as well as occasional differences in meaning.
On top of this, even though English and German are part of the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, the members of the family are more distantly related to each other than the members of the Romance language branch are to each other. I don't know if this is just a result of classification or what, but it helps explain why German has been tougher to learn for me than French.
A couple of other surprising facts about German (from Wikipedia): "Worldwide, German accounts for the most written translations into and from a language. Furthermore it belongs to the three most learned and to the ten most spoken languages worldwide (according to the Guinness Book of Records)."