The challenge of learning a new human language lies primarily in their sheer size; especially assuming two essentially unrelated languages like Chinese and English, you must relearn everything; the words, the phonology, the surface grammar, even as you still really have noun, verb, adverb, adjective. Learning a new programming language on the other hand can cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about programming in general... but you can do it relatively quickly because opening a file, reading some strings, chewing on them, and spitting them out into a new file just doesn't take several thousand verbs and nouns.
I make these observations without value judgment. I'm not saying one is better or worse than the other; both are worth pursuing. If I have a particular point at all I guess it would be that using the learning of a computer or human language as a metaphor for the other doesn't seem like a great idea to me, there's too many relevant differences for the points people want to make.