I was never that good of a Japanese speaker so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but to me it felt like there was a lot more ambiguity about things in Japanese than in English. And I definitely found when I used it for long periods of time, even my way of perceiving the world around me changed, in a way that seemed closer to how the Japanese I knew perceived it. I never knew if this was a cause or an effect. And I _definitely_ experienced, as you say, knowing that there was no way to translate something to English without losing its Japanese "feeling".