In some of my linguistic studies (for me a lot of it was while I
   was learning Russian, which wasn't that hard to learn to read
   and speak poorly), I paid a lot of attention to the sentence
   music. Each sentence plays a song. and phrases within sentences
   play songs and a really animated speaker their faces and bodies
   join in as well. Without understanding a word it's often
   possible to understand the gist of what someone is talking
   about. Perhaps not nouns but certainly reaction... which is
   usually what's more important to people and indicates "what's
   important". It's not the logic but how it makes them feel. If
   you can read and manage (work with) someone's moods, you can
   take care of 80% of communication's difficulties right there,
   whatever the language.