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”
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.