I have some bright colorful pens, pink, blue (two shades of blue), and purple, I also have a black one (though I don't know if that one works or not). With my particular vision impairment seeing bright colors can throw me off a little with writing, though I can get a darker blue and red pens, I buy ones that are a little more expensive because the color quality is a little better than the cheap ones (for me at least), also I'm noticing with German at least on Duolingo is that some words the first letter is capitalized while other words they aren't, so writing in all caps may not be a good idea with German. I will just have to write slower to make it more clear to me.

I read an article last night about the 5 easiest languages for English speakers to learn, they are Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, and Portuguese. For Dutch it said like you mentioned like you said that it is like a go between English and German. Me I went straight for German, but that's because that is where my interest lies language wise, though I may check out Dutch to see if I can pick anything up and see how it is similar to English. Spanish being on the list didn't surprise me, it is a common language spoken here in the U.S. besides English. But Swedish and Norwegian surprised me as I thought those world be hard languages to learn, I don't know because I don't really have interest in those two languages (though I do have a great-great Grandmother who immigrated to the U.S. from Norway). I thought it was an interesting article.

I'm hoping learning a language gets easier as I go along, right now since I'm at the very beginning I feel like I'll never learn a language, but I know it takes practice, I just have to stay motivated.