Few people know it but it was written with the idea of very human-like descriptions of what's to be done. I'd wager anyone with a basic introduction to programming could quickly become productive in the language. Although you wouldn't guess it if you went to my college in the early 80s.

For reasons only known to my computer science dean COBOL was a third year course after after BASIC, Pascal and FORTRAN in 1985 or so when I was working through the curriculum for a CS degree. Fourth year was BAL (IBM mainframe assembly) followed by a language of your own design.