[jwingy]

Interesting comparison, but I find it hard to relate to at all simply due to the sheer amount of words you need to learn in a real foreign language to achieve fluency. Seems much more daunting to me...but I guess my glasses are tinted.

[njs12345]

Try http://memrise.com/ for vocab learning - it's really helped expand my French vocabulary quite lot and seems to make it stick well. Doesn't really help with spoken fluency though, for that you just need lots of practice!

[chousho]

Thank you so much for bringing this site to my attention. It seems to have become a nice replacement for smart.fm which I used a few years ago.

[georgieporgie]

Hey, that's a really neat site! I like the way it's implemented.

[zwp]

I'm certain real-world languages are much harder too. I'm surprised that the author, a perler, didn't make the connection to Wall's "Natural Language Principles in Perl":

http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html

This document is quite old and I disagree with some of those things now (in particular Perl's "more than one way to do [say] it" lead to a lack of enforced standard idioms; compare python). But other points eg "acceptable levels of competence" are valuable for the humble programmer to keep in mind.

Similarly, I like the idea of a programming "accent": the effects of previous programming languages on your current language. For example a (ahem) rubyist that starts to write in python might reach for map() when they perhaps ought to use list comprehensions. A speaker with a heavy accent can still however make themselves usefully understood.