Sorry for the wrong word, I didn't mean to cause any confusion.

Okay, let's call it a misbelief (even though I'm pretty sure you did understand what exactly I was trying to say).
My thought was that culture is way wider than just learning the language. Through language you can understand some basic, key features of our "cognition and how we see the world". That's true and that goes without saying. I'm talking about further processing of our local reality and how we sense it.

It can't be denied that there are some specific Russian common local habits, standard behavior patterns in certain situations, jokes... What I'm talking about is that these things are beyond the language and at the same time, they are undoubtedly an important part of the culture. Yes you do need to know the language to feel such things and their reasoning, but the language is simply a means to understand them, not an ultimate goal. The fact that you know the language well doesn't mean that you know the culture well. That's what I wanted to say.

To be more specific, I can't help but mention a few funny facts from my biography.
When I met my wife and when we started dating and I got acquaintant with her family and her surroundings I literally opened for myself yet another layer of the Russian culture. I live in a small town near Nizhniy Novgorod and she comes from a village about 20 miles away from it.

When I got around her place I learned some weird old beliefs, like that about the water to become holy in the night of the Christening; we had to stand a whole line to ladle a bottle of holy water out of that well near their house that midnight. That night, it came as a great surprize for me and that was something new I learned, that I hadn't known before. There were tons of new words used by the older people there (either just local/regional or obsolete but still in use), many habits, much more that I learned when I got the hang of their lifestyle. Although ... we (oh, wow!) spoke the same language, lol! Isn't that culture? Yes it is.

That's what I mean by saying that culture is something more than meets the eye just a language.