I speak romanian and I can asure you that there are more similarities between romanian and germanic languages than between italian or spanish and germanic languages. BTW I speak spanish and russian as well.

friend = prieten
dad = tata

The problem of western europens is that you don't know much about East Europe and their languages. Most of easterners visited at least once the West Europe and they can compare better who is who, besides this they know some english, some german, some french and so on, so they can compare western languages with their eastern ones. How much of you know russian, ukranian, romanian and so on? Russian have a lot of common words with all germanic languages, especially with northern brench, it seems like russians are slavonized germanic people. I also visited Spain, France, Italy, Germany and I can say that the most handsome people live in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus.