Filipinos learning Spanish have a tremendous head start. There are hundreds of nouns in Tagalog which are Spanish words. I am sure that is because when the Spanish colonised the Philippines, everything then introduced, which was not there before, became known by it's Spanish name.
The same thing happened with the various invasions and colonisations of UK, thus in English there are words from Latin (from the Romans) German, French and Norse, although many of those words were originally Germanic too.
