We tend to roll thoughts through our minds so gracefully that we forget to realize there is a structure to those thoughts. Those thoughts also have a vocabulary. There are things we do and do not include into our thoughts because there may not be a an actual word or phrase available in our native tongue to conjure up a needed image.
General and Special Relativity seems like a trivial thing to think about now, once the genius of Einstein was able to dumb it down to our level. But before this, there was probably only one individual on the planet capable of visualizing Relativity and he had years of training in the language of Math and Physics to guide his imagination.
There are many studies that talk about this very thing; I’ll link to a single article. If anyone has seen the movie Arrival, the movie’s entire premise is about what language we think in .
[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201808/how-the-language-you-speak-influences-the-way-you-think](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201808/how-the-language-you-speak-influences-the-way-you-think)
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If you thought Arrival was a neat movie about language (and it is), you should read the original story (called “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang) that it was based on! It goes into a bit more detail about the alien writing system in a really cool way (cool especially for anyone who’s studied a logographic writing system).
That movie was great >!right until the phone call scene with the…Chinese General? President? I forgot who it was but for me the movie jumped the shark at that point!< spoilers obviously.
To answer your question, no. The main reason it’s so hard (kanji and other particularities aside), is because you have very little to go off of: you basically have to learn to speak again from scratch. Just look at 気 and its million uses; English has nothing like that. Or verbs like かける (掛ける, 駆ける, etc.). Expressions and concepts that are straightforward or closely tied together in your native language may feel completely alien in Japanese (be it because of phrasing or simply because it’s not used). And then there’s the problem of collocations.
Take for example: 「どちらの出身ですか？」->”Where are you from?” But my textbook taught me 「どこから来ましたか？」. Moreover, どちら? I thought where was どこ? What’s that の doing there? 「出身」? Does it mean place, location, or what? What do you mean it can also refer to the school you graduated from or a location you moved from or worked at?
Language does condition the way you think, because a language might have a word for something that doesn’t exist in another, a word might turn into a sentence, a proverb or metaphor might work differently, etc. However, that’s not the problem per se. It’s just a matter of getting used to it and hitting upon the correct way to communicate your thoughts.
Honestly I think the manner in which language itself shapes our thinking can get a bit exaggerated. I’ve seen the “wine-dark sea” thing a lot, but even it is less clear than it’s usually presented: etymology is always debated, lots of Homer’s colour choices seem weird (e.g. green honey and violet sheep), ancient wine wouldn’t be the same quality as modern ones, and wouldn’t be viewed through modern wine glasses, so would appear different, etc. etc.
And even when you do need to consider differing ways of labelling colour, a lot of the Sapir-Whorf’y type phenomena can also be described as you getting quicker at classification tasks that you do frequently, and linguistics giving hints to how people frequently classify things depending on their language. That terms in two languages can’t be put in one-to-one correspondence is important to know, and the details are scientifically interesting, but “you get better at things you practice” comes across a bit less profound.
Don’t mean this to sound hostile, because I do find these things interesting; I just think the way a lot of pop science stuff gets presented doesn’t go much further than scientific trivia. “You get better at things you practice” is super important for language learning, but trying to treat it as super deep risks overcomplicating things I think.
A couple of things – most researchers on this have been horribly destroyed by actual research. This is called linguistic determinism and is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The brain does not think in a language – the subconscious arranges it into thoughts that are then used. As language learners we encounter this every day.
When you see the word “mother” or “お母さん” you will know without actively thinking – IF the word is in your long term memory and if your subconscious has made enough connections so that you do not need to think about it. Beginners may not be able to react to seeing お母さん, but that is because it is still on the ‘conscious’ recognition level.
The perceptions of color, time and other aspects of thought shaping reality and thought is the cornerstone of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but barring colorblindness colors are the same to everyone. People just like to use 青 as an example to make a ridiculous notion that people actually could not distinguish green and blue from one another. It is just the word used to describe the color as conditions (such as fruits/facial/traffic lights…etc). The same applies to English with ‘green’ – we still can easily tell the differences in one color to another, but most people to not rigidly define boundaries in our language. (Think mint green, olive, lime.)
Language changes how we EXPRESS ourselves, but it does not shape our thoughts. A person who does not have a word for how they feel will not be prevented from experiencing that feeling. Whether it be depression, pride, or guilt. When it comes to crafting communication the language CAN be restrictive in its plain sense, but that is why languages invent new terms to express those concepts more clearly. Certain pictorial memes can evoke emotions better than the user can describe, such as cringe.
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Edit to add about Einstein: We understand special relativity better (scientifically at least) than Einstein ever did because it is required to make even GPS work. We literally have proof of his work everywhere – but Einstein’s thought experiment was difficult to conceptualize. Einstein was not really good at math growing up, he just stuck with a problem for a long time and kept working on it. He did not invent special relativity (like Newton did not invent gravity) – he was able to devise a means to test his theory. Also, he hated quantum mechanics and in particular the ‘spooky action at a distance’ which is quantum entanglement which defies conventional physics. And frankly, this gets to be scary because it means quite literally that observation changes the universe.