As a native English speaker who's tried to learn Japanese, the distinction between Perl, APL, and their ilk and other languages to me seems more akin to ideography vs. syllabary/alphabet (i.e., characteristics of the writing systems) than to natural language vs. computer language.

My big problem with reading and writing Perl is the same as my problem reading and writing Japanese: there's just so much you have to flat-out memorize. Look at the index to the Perl book: it begins with a vast collection of arbitrary symbol pairs. Sort of like written Japanese words are collections of often somewhat arbitrary ideographs, because many words were borrowed from Chinese over many centuries, while the Chinese writing system was evolving.

Of course, people still learn to read and write Japanese fluently; it just takes a long time (12 years of schooling). I bet I'd be fluent in Perl if I spent 12 years learning it as well. But I'd rather not have to do that to use a programming language well.