I recently spent a few days in Stockholm, Sweden. I loved the city and am looking forward to returning for a few days in January.

Whilst sitting in a pancake cafe, I sat listening to the conversation at the table next to me, as well as the girls running the place. (I was not eves-dropping, I don't speak a word of Swedish.)

I love the sound of the Swedish language, there is something so lyrical about it.

As I sat there I imagined the loss of just hearing the language being spoken, if I were to learn the language.

The thing is, once you understand a language, you have no control over your brain's insistence on decoding the mouth noises into sentences and meanings. (Try it. See if you can listen just to the sounds the next time you hear someone speaking your language, without decoding the meaning in the sounds.)

In this way, learning Swedish would rob me of something, even though I would gain a lot.

As I was thinking about this, I realised that this holds true, but that it also delivers a greater beauty as you develop your understanding of a language.

I am sure there are amazing phrases and expressions in Swedish, which only reveal their true beauty once you have a deeper understanding of the word-play, context and history they hold.

It is the same with my mother-tongue, Afrikaans. There are expressions in that language that one might be able to translate, but all the meaning is lost in the translation, it becomes hollow words.

I don't think this is only true of language though. I know it to be true of music, and imagine it is true for Mathematics and many other disciplines.

You must sacrifice one type of beauty in order to access something deeper.