As many South Asian languages are Indo-European...

Does this make them any easier for a native English speaker (or any native Indo-European speaker) to learn than it would be to learn Arabic, Mandarin, or any non-Indo European language for that matter, or are IE South Asian languages so far removed from those IE languages present on the European continent that any similarity from a learners point of view has pretty much disappeared?

Cheers

The South Eastern Asian languages borrowed a lots of loanwords from Sanskrit and Pali.