If you're familiar with ancient and medieval European history, you're pretty much familiar with the origins of most of the European languages.
Areas that were part of the Roman Empire generally speak Latin dialects like Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic).
Germany and Scandinavia speak Germanic languages because they were never Roman. Britain was only partially Roman and for significantly less time than France or southern Europe so it retained its Celtic languages except in the part conquered by the Anglo-Saxons (a Germanic tribe) who originally spoke a German language called Old English which was mostly mutually comprehensible with Old Norse (the language of a Germanic tribe called the Vikings who invaded England a few centuries after the Anglo-Saxons and were eventually converted to Christianity and assimilated). Then they were conquered by a French nobleman in 1066 and the English nobility spoke French for a few centuries before it fused with "Old English" into something that sounds somewhat like English.
Because of this, English speakers already know a significant number of words in both Germanic and "Romance" (Latin) languages, even moreso than for other Indo-European languages. But you still need to be careful not to trust a German offering you a "gift" (the German word for "poison" because, in German, it was a euphemism that lost its original meaning of English "gift"[0]).
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gift