Comment by retrac
Dutch is so close to English that at times it is almost a dialect of English. "Ik zag de boot zinken." / "I saw the boat sink."
The rest of the world can't watch English TV with subtitles for a few months/years and come away with a passing understanding of English. It's a much steeper cliff.
The technical term is diglossia and it's much more common when the two languages are closely related. Latin being the written standard when the spoken language had evolved into Old French or Old Spanish is another classic example.
Old Spanish (12th century, El Cid as an example) was closer on spelling to Latin than the 16/17th century one from Don Quixote.