One can master owns native language being an adult, why not? I am Russian and I enjoy translating wonderfully sounding English concepts to Russian. As you can

One can master owns native language being an adult, why not? I am Russian and I enjoy translating wonderfully sounding English concepts to Russian. As you can understand, it takes a little bit of mastery in both languages. The upside I get is that these wonderfully sounding language concepts often lose all their charm when translated into Russian. They turn into a pumpkin. This way I can better focus on what is essential. As I am here on the matter of focusing on essential things, please look at "Being Popular" essay by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html Let me quote: "They're perfectly justified: the majority of hot new whatevers do turn out to be a waste of time, and eventually go away. By delaying learning VRML, I avoided having to learn it at all." Another upside of translating things is that you often cannot apply same questions to English and Russian terms. There are questions applicable only to English term and there are questions for Russian term which are not applicable to English one. You have to do analysis anew, finding new sides of the problem, which either show you the problem's true underwater size or help you solve it.