It's really weird for me because German and Dutch are almost mutually intelligible, and then when you add the occasional English phrases, with concentration I can understand maybe 40% of what they're saying. Very odd. Actually veen, do you find you can understand much German? I wonder if intelligibility is parallel or one-sided.
Linguistically, Dutch is very close to German. It's even the case that some dialects near the border with Germany (in the Dutch Lower Saxon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Low_Saxon#Dialects) ) sound more German and take words and grammar from it. Because my dads part of the family is from Drenthe, I can understand German better. I had some high school German which has mostly faded away, but I can fill in the German words I don't know with their Dutch or Drents equivalent and Germans understand me well enough. Understanding written German is easier than spoken German, although that's probably the case for most closely related languages.