I agree with your overall point. I run a Chinese teaching business though (http://popupchinese.com http://popupchinese.com) and think the analogy is a bit misle

I agree with your overall point. I run a Chinese teaching business though (http://popupchinese.com http://popupchinese.com) and think the analogy is a bit misleading. Unlike English with all of its irregularities, Chinese definitely gets easier and easier as people learn. There's a failure of pedagogy in teaching the language. Chinese grammar is trivial if taught properly (we teach "prepositions" and "adjectives" before introducing "coverbs" and "stative verbs" and that seems to work). And while the tones can be tricky, most people don't get nearly enough listening and speaking practice. As you said though, practice makes perfect. For me recursion was fun but memory management with vectors of pointers was a bitch. Easy to have a conceptual understanding, but the sort of thing you only master when you need to trace stuff through source to figure out where an error is. Then it clicks for good. :)