User blog comment:Razlem/How do you prefer to learn a language?/@comment-1883086-20100721004424

You're better at Romance languages because (supposing your native language is English) Romance languages are the adoptive parents of English. Really, more of English's vocabulary comes from Romance languages than it does from Germanic languages (sadly). And the close proximity makes them quite alike, something I've noticed from actually having to study French.

Any Slavic language, really, or any language outside the Germanic-Romance family would be potentially problematic for you (except probably Icelandic. It's archaic and still has declensions, which would give you a problem, considering irregular declensions make up for a good chunk of all nouns).

With Chinese, you simply need to meet someone from a specific dialect. The same happens to a lot of Spanish learners that I've met, as they all merge the Castillian accent with a Mexican one (awkwaaard :p).

And the immersion in a different country idea depends on the person. Most -- not all -- immigrants are hesitant to learn any other language from their own -- especially the language of the country they immigrated to -- because they feel they'd be abandoning their culture. It really depends on the person. The whole full-on-immersion usually works only with people who are actually dedicated to a language, rather than people who had to move to said country and never had an interest in the language.