It's easy to talk around missing concepts. Language learners do it all the time, figuring out how to talk around concepts that they don't know the words for. It's a bit harder to learn all the subtle and idiomatic ways people have of expressing things that they have a concept of but which aren't grammatically encoded in their language, but that's only necessary for fluency. It's
much harder to constantly be aware of things that a language forces you to always know, but which you are used to thinking about only if there is a special reason they are relevant, such as direction in Kuuk Thaayorre, source of knowledge in Tuyuca, and fine degrees of hierarchy and intimacy in Japanese and some other Asian languages.
Studying Japanese, I often resented the need to be aware of social hierarchy. By contrast, I would love to develop my directional awareness, and I think I would appreciate the discipline imposed by Kuuk Thaayorre! I naturally mentally lay places out on a grid which is much straighter in my mind than in reality. I "know" a place when my mind automatically fixes the mismatch between grid orientation and reality.
By the way, is anybody besides me ridiculously linguistically impressionable? The latest thing for me is getting my singulars and plurals mixed up, and spitting out tiny sentence fragments that can be completed from context but which sound childish in English, all because of the influence of my Korean girlfriend. I got an 800 on my verbal SATs, and this is horribly embarrassing and traumatic for me.