Had numerous mindblowing epiphanies while I was living and working and studying in Japan.
Mini mindblown when I realised that Japanese have different words for animal noises. I guess before then I just assumed everyone in the world would say ‘woof woof’, ‘meow meow’ and ‘cockledoodle doo’ not ‘wan wan’ nya nya’ and ‘cocky caw caw’
Mindblown when I realised that not only do Japanse have different exclamations for things like when you hurt yourself ‘itte’ instead of ‘ouch’ ‘etto’ instead of ‘um’. It’s minblowing to realise that such language utterances become automatic. And best of all at some point and without a conscious effort to do so I switched to using them.
Fully mindblown when I had a girlfriend stay over at my place and she told me I’d been talking in my sleep. Nothing unusual I thought until she explained more and told me I was sleeptalking entirely in Japanese. It was at this point I knew I was on my way to cracking the language.