Adding a comment to Susan's thought: Interestingly enough, to me, recently I reckon that learning how Chinese characters structure the meaning/definition of words within the structure of the characters would give me an intense practice in dissecting, synthesising, and naming observations of scenarios in life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9BJRE4r46g I reckon my ability to construct poetry would rise exponentially.
So I can very much see translation as a way to intensely practice a whole bunch of useful subskills, but I suspect that Chinese would allow a person to drill down a level below words, in a way treating each chinese character/character combination as its own "poem".