As a fellow chinese learner and coder I find this interesting, but I can't agree 100%. I think one of the troubles of learning chinese for a westerner is the difficulty in pronouncing it compared to pronouncing e.g. German. You can't just try to speak it, you need to learn about the tones and the very different sounds. When I started programming Basic as a kid you could just try stuff. You learned as you went. The entry barrier was quite low for someone that was computer literate. However, I find the entry barrier to learning Chinese to be quite high with the pronounciation and difficult characters. I should write a blog post like "Pain. Or, Why Learning to Code is like Learning German". But I must say the post resonates somewhat when I see beautiful Ruby or F# code.