It's amazing, as Goethe knew, how your native language begins to appear to you the more you learn, and the better you get, at other languages. Whenever I come back to English, I marvel, truly marvel, at the comfort, at the incredible flexibility being a native user affords me. Slang, different dialects, accents, all these things, it feels like a wonderful game. Stretching the limits of what I can say in order to be still understood, how many syllables I can cut, the obliqueness that is possible when you have been communicating in this language for 20 years. It's like, as another website I saw one time described it, a language being like a city. When you start learning a new language, it's like moving to a new city. You can learn it as well as you'd like. But your native language, you so many back alleys, secret nooks, you have places where you and your friends have hung out many times, you have areas where the young people hang out, the more formal areas, and in general you can just play more. I just LOVE how much the language can be stretched, and how it's always changing, just like a very active city like New York. Like I can write "check dis du ova heah nigga, du be trippin doe" and be understood by many people (mostly younger, I would imagine)