I thought we pretty much agreed that's how it works for programming languages, and from my experience it applies to natural language as well. My native languag

I thought we pretty much agreed that's how it works for programming languages, and from my experience it applies to natural language as well. My native language is Swedish. I've studied English since I was 8 (and I'm 42 now), German for 3 years in school and lived there for 4, two years of Italian and two years of Chinese. It seems the more languages I learn, the more interesting and worthwhile it gets to compare similarities/differences and the easier it is to learn new ones. Learning a completely different language, such as Chinese coming from English, has similar benefits to learning Lisp coming from Java. It stretches the brain in exotic ways.