What is the closest language to English?

AJC   Sun Dec 02, 2007 9:48 am GMT
<No, you couldn't. I have a Swedish grammar that runs to 595 pages. And there's tons of stuff it doesn't even cover. (Phonology for one thing)>

I didn't mean all the grammar there *is* in Swedish, rather a list of the aspects of it you'd need to master to give a reasonable approximation of Swedish. I'd say this would be significantly smaller than for any other language. I'd have specifically excluded phonology myself but the *overall* difficulty in mastering the language wasn't the question I was addressing so much as the relative closeness of the structure.