I personally feel like I understand German-speaking people better the more I study the language.
E.g. my experience was that they are generally good listeners because their language has a sentence structure which forces the listener to wait for the most important information at the end of a sentence.
Bad Denglish to demonstrate:
“I have yesterday night… at the football field… together with friends … (dude get to the point) had a beer”
There’s research to suggest that every language comes with its own specific mode of thinking, which means that for every additional language you pick up, you quite literally gain a new perspective on things in general. I absolutely believe it. It’s also why the party in 1984 was hellbent on using newspeak and outlawing previous languages.
Language indeed has a lot of power and control over how we think.
It’s been in various pieces of classical literature and 1984 is a great example!
i believe it but i think people vastly overstate the degree to which it’s true, it’s not like it completely changes how you think, every language just has some different quirks to it. I mean look at the language people adopt in places like hong kong to avoid censorship, you can communicate basically anything no matter how limited your language is, you just need some time to develop a shared understanding.