Aha! Interesting that you see the Dutch g sound as an English h; to me, the English h is... I can see some resemblance but, at the same time, it seems as different as the vowel in "seems" and "says". (Then again, perhaps someone from a language without an a-as-in-says sound would approximate that with e-as-in-seems.) I indeed won't say Dutch is a great language to the ears, it's neutral to me. It's the one I'm verbally best in due to nativeness, but I'd just as soon it gets replaced with something more widely spoken! Much more practical for everyone.
Thanks for writing this guide by the way, I expect these practical tips are going to help me with German :)
I found the language pretty bad sounding (almost ridiculous hhh-hhh sounds)
Now I am curious: what sounds are these? As in, what is it actually spelled like, because no word sounds like six "h"es after each other in English
This description rather reminds me of Icelandic, where I noticed in a video playing in a museum (geothermal energy exhibition) that they have the same word for "hand" as Dutch, except there is a huff after the word, like "hand'hh". It sounded as silly to me as it probably does to English speakers when putting a stray quiet gasp for air after each instance of the word "hand".
I am not aware that Dutch has elongated "h" sounds like that, so maybe you mean something like the "g" in Den Haag (The Hague) or the "ch" in Utrecht, which I suppose can be h-like (but, to me, that's a single one and not elongated)?
Yeah I wish. I'm even from the region that has a lot of German influence in its dialect (as if Dutch itself wasn't Germanlike enough), but my innate comprehension is at the level where in high school I once looked through the list of words to study before a multiple-choice test, thought "yeah this looks doable, I'd know most of these and thus pass the test", and then went on to score worse than random on the actual test as the only student. (If only that teacher could see me living in Germany now; we'd have a good laugh.) And that's not even considering the language has fifty words for "the" as well as adjectives, which will take forever to become automated in my head.
Didn't have much trouble with French in school -- not that I remember any of it by now -- and evidently English is no problem either. It's just German. I'm listening to German podcasts, posting in German subreddits (using tools like DeepL Write or, before that existed, just DeepL translate it back into English and see if it comes out right), speaking to the neighbors in German, reading German books, recently started chatting with some coworkers in German: the whole shebang. It has been five years and my German is functional now, but only barely...
Ah, look on the bright side: I got the opportunity to work here in English so far and allow myself this time to get that foundation going. And at least I seem to have Zusammenschreibung down to about native level because it works exactly the same as in Dutch. (I think this is an objectively useful feature, which English kinda has it but takes them decades to decide "life saver" or "web site" are really just one word and it needn't use a space that also, ambiguously, separates things that are not part of the noun, so German has that going for it!)
Generalizing, though, I cannot imagine there exist many languages easier than German for a Dutch native (Afrikaans, maybe English because it's so simple and Germanic-ish, and perhaps something like Swedish? So that leaves German around rank ~5 out of about ten thousand languages?) so you're right in that regard, but it's still a considerable amount of effort. It's far beyond learning a dialect but, yeah, also short of learning something like Japanese. The inverse is easier because German has all the grammar rules Dutch has and then some, so they just need to use a subset of what they know.