I feel like it's something that happens with the english language a lot tho may not be limited to it. Where you decide to reword something and the whole sentence needs to be rewritten. I think swedish and german are more forgiving there but not sure if that's what you meant.
That's really interesting that you're learning mandarin. I feel like I'm way past being able to learn new languages but maybe I'm just not trying hard enough, coding languages would've been a good decision for me and I regret not having stuck with it.
Learning a programming language is much easier than learning a language, so I would say for sure it is not too late to learn programming. Learning a new real language is a lot of work and you need something to keep you motivated. My own study is pretty intermittent.
Most recently I got motivated to study Mandarin some more after watching some Korean shows on Netflix and realizing I was learning a few Korean words, so I decided to see how I would do if I started watching some Chinese shows there as well.
My two biggest weaknesses at present are 1) I have trouble understanding spoken Chinese because my brain translates words too slowly and 2) I sometimes don't know the "normal/common/popular" way to put a set of words together to express a larger concept. Watching the shows is helping with both of those and it's a kind of low-effort way to study, so I can do it when I'm just trying to chill out at the end of a day.