As a Dutch person i find Afrikaans always interesting whenever i happen to encounter it in the wild. As if a common ancestor took a very different evolutionary path.
Given that Dutch is the ancestor here (not that Dutch hasn't changed since the split), I wouldn't call it "as if".
It's fascinating to look up the etymology of words and see how it looks in Dutch. I find Afrikaans to be much closer to English than Dutch or German (which I previously learned). Do you find Afrikaans comprehensible?