That is the most poetic translation of a Czech proverb I could think up. The most accurate one would sound rather weird: “As many languages you know, as many times you are a human being”. As a matter of fact, the language you think in determines and limits the way you think. The boundaries remain invisible until you realize them. It might remind you of the Plato's Cave a bit.
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Various languages helped mankind to evolve in many branches and disciplines. Knowing the European ones only, I could point out German and English. The first one’s ability to create structured and accurate neologisms boosted social sciences such are psychology and anthropology, the latter served as the best possible model-language for artificial computer languages. Could you imagine programming in languages based on German or French structure?
As the Czech Hive community grows stronger and we run a witness and seed node servers either (thanks to 
Even though there is almost zero chance that she (or you) would ever speak fluent, since Czech is commonly considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn (or even pronounce when it comes to our special consonants such are Ž, Š, Č, Ř, Ď, Ť or Ň and long vowels). The keen reason is to help her understand a language structure that is completely different to the other non-Slavic languages excluding Latin. The knowledge may open you the doors of perception in quite a different way than Aldous Huxley would suggest.
Flexible word order and emphasizing
Interested? That’s great. Look at the magic of flexible word order. Each of the following sentences means the same thing – that Martin drinks beer. (or Martin is drinking beer – we actually don’t have any continuous tenses.) However, each of them bears additional meaning as they emphasize different words, generally the first one. In some cases, the most important thing in the sentence is the beer (well, I’m Czech after all), in some cases it is Martin. We can even emphasize the verb if we want to point out the activity:
How can we always know what is the subject and what is the object? Well, in Czech every noun and adjective, most pronouns and some numerals are declined. That means they “form cases”, change depending on their role in a sentence. We have 7 cases for singular and 7 for plural. I will cover that later on in a separate post.
Anyways, thanks to declinations, we can place nouns almost anywhere in the sentence and we still know which role they take.
Let’s apply that on the sentences above. Martin is always in the first case (nominative), which means that he is always the subject of the sentence. Pivo (beer) is always in the fourth case (accusative), which means it is always the object.
- This is rather neutral version. Martin is generally more important than beer, so is the process of drinking.
- In this one, the speaker points out beer a bit. It may express something like: Of course that Martin drinks beer, why shouldn’t he?
- Imagine a group of people and somebody asking: Who drinks beer among us? In case that beer is the topic and the beer-drinker is not that important for that conversation, we would say this version of the sentence.
- This version is not common but it could exist as a variant in the situation above.
- This sentence emphasizes the activity, drinking. It sounds a bit weird for that particular example but such construction exists. It could be one of the possibilities we have to express continuous tenses.
Most Czech people cannot describe the differences the way I did above just because they do not think about the structure of our language the way I usually do. However, the native speakers have, of course, a sense to use it accordingly.