Hagnesta Hill Americans are notorious for cultural myopia, so I'm a little self-conscious about the fact that although I'm a product of more or less the best general education the country is prepared to provide, I cannot communicate meaningfully in any human language but English. I had two years each of French and German in high school, a year of Swedish in college, and whatever ambient Spanish you naturally absorb growing up in Texas and being an American soccer fan, which is enough exposure to give me a general idea about how languages operate, and convince me that language modifies perception as well as expression, but nowhere near enough for me to experience the effect for myself. I assume there are some, perhaps even serious ones, but there's no practical way for me to find out, and the backlog of English books I want to read is already so unwieldy that I have basically given up on the others.
Music is hopeless.
I like Runrig's Gaelic songs, and I have a bunch of Swedish records by Per and Marie from Roxette, but I've never formed a significant bond with a band that doesn't sing in English at least half the time. What should help is hearing the same song in two different languages, but I have surprisingly few samples of that. Roxette's album of ballads translated from English to Spanish doesn't count, since neither tongue is their native one. Merely listening to the two records back to back, unfortunately, is not enlightening. Once I've heard the songs in English, the Swedish versions just sound garbled to me.