Ilam currently learning Perl as my first language, and enjoy it immensely. Of course I learned English as my native toungue, which makes it a bit different.
My question for you t0mas, is why is it neccessary for your child to understand the meaning of a word/function/subroutine/operator in order to use it? If the "word" 'dsfg' did the same thing as 'print', it wouldn't make any difference to me besides the fact that it would take a little more effort to remember what exactly it did.