Romanian

The only Romance language that retained the case system from Latin, which sounds intimidating but is actually simpler than German's. Romanian shares 77% lexical similarity with Italian and has a highly phonetic spelling system. English speakers benefit from massive vocabulary overlap via Latin and French roots. The definite article is attached to the end of the word ("lupul" = "the wolf"), which is unusual but learnable. 24 million native speakers. FSI: 600 hours. It's the Romance language most people forget exists.