As someone who speaks both English and German natively, I can say Dutch makes my brain hurt whenever I hear it. It’s like my brain can’t pick which neural pathways to use and the dissonance is awful.

Even as a native English speaker who speaks no German, I find being in The Netherlands to feel a lot like the part of my brain that is hearing a conversation and trying to tune in is working at native speed, but the language parsing part can't make any sense of it.

Sometimes when I'm in parts of the world where I'm surrounded by other languages I don't speak, I find I'm almost automatically tuning out people speaking them around me. That doesn't happen at all with Dutch.