Definitely. For me (native speaker of an Indo-European language), learning Chinese is like learning a functional programming language when you only know C. Give me a subject, a verb, and some objects and I can build you a more or less natural sounding sentence in five different European languages (two of them I have never used in an oral conversation). When I tried the same in Chinese, I would first have to consult my grammar book to see what specific pattern to use, decide whether it would be more natural to have a topic in front of the sentence, check the previous sentence to see whether I need the subject at all or whether I can just attach the verb to the previous sentence, and then finally add a couple of "le" here and there :) and still have a result that is wrong because "that's not how you say it".