My favorite anecdote about Dutch people speaking English:

My husband and I were taking a few weeks after college graduation to visit Europe. I had studied French in school, so we made stops in a few different French cities. In one city, Lille, we were chatting in the town square when a group of 3 teenage boys came running up to us. In perfect English, one said "You speak English!! Thank God! We're here on a school trip from (some city in the Netherlands) and need to take a photo with someone here for a scavenger hunt." They admitted that they were completely horrified of the prospect of having to attempt to speak French in France.

A long time ago, before Analogue Terrestrial TV (OTA) was replaced by Digital broadcasts in the UK, I was visiting a friend in Amsterdam. I was surprised to discover that she was watching BBC television. The signal was strong enough to be received in Amsterdam, and I often wonder if this is why the Dutch are historically better at English because they watched so many British TV shows.

In Belgium, a country that got an early lead in cable coverage, there were antennas at the North Coast specifically placed for receiving the BBC broadcasts and feeding it into the analog cable system.

I dunno, it's more like ... English, Dutch, and German are West Germanic languages, but unlike German English and Dutch did not undergo the high German consonant shift. So many cognate words that seem odd in German are similar in Dutch.

As a native English speaker who has German family and studied German I always have found that Dutch seems "halfway" between the two languages. I can usually figure out what a sentence means by reading it that way.

As an English speaker who knows a bit of German, Dutch basically seems like a random combination of English and German words with a few misspellings thrown in for kicks.

The Danes are better, at least for speaking and listening.

In Denmark, I can speak English to the cleaner, the security guard, the fast food seller, quite young children, the bus driver, and pensioners. Both in Copenhagen and smaller towns.

In the Netherlands, this has mixed results.

Writing can be mixed in Denmark. They are so confident in their ability, they don't check the result. I suspect few bothered to take the voluntary test this useless survey is based on.

(Source: I live in Denmark, I visit the Netherlands for work.)

Agreed. As a kid, I once picked a gaming name that was unbeknownst to me a Dutch word. So many other kids would join and start speaking what I presume to be Dutch, and when I said I'm American they'd have a laugh and speak in perfect English.