Chrash-course in Danish pronounciation:
"Rødgrød med fløde" (= red porridge with cream) is a Danish dessert and a famous Danish tongue twister.
RØD - say a deep French/Parisian r, then a hard and long ø (like u in church) while you push some air violently out of your lungs and just ignore the d.
GRØD - a hard g, then this French r, then the ø again and pronounce the d as th in Englsih that.
MED =meh
FLØDE - f, then l, then very long ø (u as in church), d as th and at last and eh.
Although English will focus more on the consonants I think English and Danish share this totally strange and unpredictable pronounciation!
Frederik from Norway: <<When it comes to vocabulary Norwegian (and especially Bokmål) is close to Danish, but when it comes to pronounciation we are more like the Swedes. The Danes speak in a strange, soft and unclear way, as if they have a potato in their mouth, so we some times have to ask them to speak more slowly in order to understand them. But reading Danish is so easy that you often forget that you are reading Danish in stead of Bokmål. Swedes are easier to understand orally, but their vocabulary is sometimes a bit different.>>
I have the same experience about Danish and Norwegian. The latter and Swedish are easier to understand in speech, and Swedish sounds the best for me of all Scandinavian languages, closely followed by Norwegian (I also like Finnish, as I said earlier, but it is not Scandinavian linguistically). The only ones I have never heard is Icelandic and Faroese, I guess they sound more archaic than the rest.
As for the original topic, English definitely sounds Germanic, but with some marked differences from most Germanic languages (absence of gutturals and the "ü" sound, for example, though as I know the latter is present in Scots). It may be due to a Norman or even Celtic influence (Scots and Irish at any rate have been influenced by a Celtic substratum, and American English by the accent spoken by settlers with Celtic ancestry).
Yes, Icelandic and Faroese sound archaic. That also means they have a lot of vowel richness, so I recently mistook a woman chatting in Icelandic for speaking a strange Italian dialect, until I heard her mention the Icelandic word for telephone, simi, whereupon she confirmed me in my opinion.
In Danish most vowels have been reduced to an ø or an e, but they are, apart from Icelandic and Faraoese, best preserved in Swedish (and west coast Norwegian. That is why these languages sound so pleasant, like northern versions of Italian. Finnish also has a great vowel richness, and is more consistent on the vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, like Italian is.
The "ü" sound is actually very close to the /u:/ (e.g. "who", "two", "boot") in many English dialects, including Southern U.S. English but generally not in American ones. The English vowel is lax and lightly diphthonged whereas the German (and Scots) vowel is pure but both "ü" and /u:/ are produced almost the same way. This pronunciation is present in most of England and is standard in Australian and NZ English.
However I don't think English generally sounds Germanic. Intonation, rhythm and pronunciation are usually quite different.