One characteristic that I like that's not mentioned in that Wikipedia article is the tendency to have only two adjectival participles (-ing and -ed, French -ant and -é).Holy Ha'Shamayim!
And as the article says, this Germanic-Romance sprachbund (with Albanian, Greek and some Balto-Slavic in the periphery) formed during the Migration Period (circa the 5th-7th centuries). Ancient Latin still had a future participle and a funny passive one with some sense of obligation (amandus), but early Romance lost both.
Another one is that, in early Germanic and early Romance, the word for "the" still retains some sense of its original meaning "that" (in early Old Spanish it even retains two syllables: elo, ela), but by the late Middle Ages both Germanic and Romance reduced them to only a definite article function.
I think you might be overestimating the actual abilities of "most students" there.I suppose most student can comprehend that rather simple semantic explanation.