I think you can come to false conclusions quite a bit if all you are basing your research off of is your own intuition. I learned Russian, and as a native English speaker it was difficult, but I can think in Russian, and I don't translate Russian into English in my head. There are some things I say in Russian that I would have no idea how to properly translate into English. The first programming language I learned was basic, but I don't think 'oh this in python is like x in basic'.