I think Welsh might officially be my last language... or at least the outer border of my language space. On the other hand, as far as I can tell right now, it might as well be an alien language, so in a sense any human language becomes fair game... Nope, no, thanks.

...I don't know where you got the info that German has flexible word order. It's true that the verb and the subject can change places in a sentence, but that change is very strictly regulated by the function of the sentence, and per function there's basically a single unchanging order, down to the sequence of adverbs.

And yeah, there's a lot of base cognates (words of same origin) with English (ich, geben), but the grammar can mess with you. I really consider English quite an unfortunate language to start off of with another. I briefly even became convinced that it should be classified as a creole, because of what Normans did to it. I mean, the loss of grammatical gender alone puts English-speakers at a big disadvantage with respect to most other Indoeuropean languages. As well as the reduction of the singular second person pronoun ("thou" - Shakespearean English, or German "du") and the subjunctive mood... Well, I'd better stop myself, before I get too excited.

On the other hand (before you run away scared), my native Russian has all these elements, and I still have barely any grasp of them (aside from "du" which is pretty natural) in German. It doesn't prevent me from very much enjoying entertainment in the language.