I think this is the way language settings are supposed to work. When I tried it, it wasn’t actually possible for me to un-select ‘Undetermined’ and for the change to go through. So we all have ‘undetermined’ pre-checked, but typically don’t won’t to see posts in every language available, so it only shows posts where a language wasn’t specified. From then, we choose the language(s) we understand and leave everything else unchecked. Since you had English unchecked (the same as anybody else who doesn’t understand it), your posts were hidden.
I wanted to try Leomard, a macOS Lemmy client for my aging MacBook, and was momentarily confused when it wouldn’t launch, saying it needed OS version 13. I was looking at it, thinking, well I’m on version 10.14, what’s the problem?