I knew that it's easier for speakers of European languages to learn English than for East Asian languages.
The important category is probably speakers of germanic languages; Italians and Russians probably don't get as big of an advantage.
I strongly suspect that they're still a lot better off than native speakers of (say) Mandarin or Korean or Japanese. To be more specific: I suspect German is somewhat better for this purpose than Italian, which in turn is substantially better than Russian, which in turn is substantially better than Hungarian, which in turn is substantially better than Mandarin.
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