Leeloo in The Fifth Element learns English and a LOT of history in no time at all. But, then again, she’s one of the Supreme Beings of the Universe in perfectly engineered body, so what do you expect?
I always felt that a race with a language like that couldn’t become scientifically and technologically advance.
I’ve seen fan theories positing that the Tamarians’ real language is highly sophisticated and complex, and that the metaphor language is a kind of “baby-talk” that they use when encountering new species.
I don’t know how well that holds up, but I had the same problems that you do with the language as we see it. If you can only speak in metaphor, how do you talk about something new? How do you talk about anything specific? How do you say something as basic as “I’ll meet you at Joe’s Steakhouse at 5:30 tomorrow”? Let alone something like “Course 251 mark 8, warp factor 2,” that you would think a spacefaring culture would need to be able to say all the time?
Or, not baby-talk, but formal diplomatic language.
In which case it seems like a poor choice. “Well, we could just say hello, but how about instead we commit an act of war and see if they pick up on the game even as their Captain and ours are hunted by a monster?”
Bart’s at the right age and in the right circumstances (he’s hearing nothing but French for several weeks) so arguably this is the most plausible example in the thread