Someone posted on a different subreddit asking about drug-free ways of escaping reality. While language is not quite an escape from reality or mind-altering in the sense of immediate change, I think learning a different language really changes the nature of experience. I'm curious to hear what others think about this topic. Kind of a showerthought-type discussion I suppose.
I know that a lot has been said and debated about the relationship between perception of reality and language, so I'd rather avoid a deep dive into the research (unless it's just to say something like 'This person's conclusions really match my own observations.'). FWIW I tend to think you don't need language to perceive reality, but that language influences how one perceives reality. Languages can make certain aspects of reality salient and others less obvious (e.g., some languages regularly encode age, social status, gender, etc. while others do not). A weird side effect of having literary Chinese for my main (TL) with an emphasis on Ming era culture, has been that I now consider things like "The Declaration of Independence" to be an interesting literary piece as much as it is a historical document. In other words, learning about opinions of literature from a different culture, gave me a different perspective of the literature of my native culture. This makes sense to me, given different languages are associated with different cultures.
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