If I was given the time and money to go to a country and learn a language there, I would be torn between Japan, Georgia and Romania.

I learnt some basic Japanese in preparation for a trip there last summer and I wish I could have the chance to really improve my fluency in the language. The main reason I stopped working on my Japanese was the fact that it’s hard to find any time or situations where I could use Japanese in my everyday life. I plan to work on my Japanese again in future as I loved Japan and hope to visit again someday but it’s hard to keep motivated when you have few opportunities to use it on a regular basis.

Georgian is my ‘flavour of the month’ (as my partner puts it) and have been dabbling with some basic Georgian over the past few weeks. It’s so different to any of the other languages I’ve studied and I can’t resist the beauty of its alphabet. Pronunciation and verb conjugation is a nightmare but I just find the language and region intriguing. If I ever have the chance, I would love to attend Georgian classes in Georgia.

As for Romanian, I have to say that I first became interested in Romanian when the boy band O-Zone were topping the music charts across Europe. Romanian sounds like a quirky cross between the Romance languages and the Slavic ones and I’m quite taken by the fact it’s retained so much of the original Latin structure and vocabulary. With Romania joining the EU in the very near future, I wonder if Romanian classes will become a lot more widespread. I certainly would love to visit Romania and put my limited skills to good use. :)

If you are the kind of person who likes to travel and who will try anything once, this question offers a great way to get motivated about your studies. But if you study language for language’s sake, maybe not.

And I’m not sure where people who learn Elvish and meet in conversation groups fit in this thing - do they put the Latinists to shame for obscurity in language choice or are they on the cutting edge in selecting a language whose culture and society interest them?

I would really like to travel to some of those ancient Incan places like Machu Picchu… which leads me to the learning of Quechua (not necessarily) and Spanish (very helpful). I’ve already had two evening courses for Spanish, but already forgot most of it over the last few months. Moreover I’d be more interested in Quechua… but you just have to know Spanish to learn that, since even first language speakers of Quechua use lots of Spanish (loan) words. Additionally you find most literature on that language in Spanish, so that’s another plus for Spanish.
Maybe when I’ve learned more Chinese and have gotten into it, I’ll start to learn some Spanish again and maybe someday I can start to learn Quechua and then go there and impress some of those “indigenos”. ;)

It was almost out of my hands. I started sipping the language, and it tasted so good that I had to glut myself on it. :-)

I would like to eventually get Russian under my belt to prove to myself that I could do it after doing a spectacularly bad job of it in college. I’ve been to Russia, but I’m more curious to visit places where I’ve never been before.

Japan seems really distant and exotic, but learning to speak Japanese reasonably well seems like a heavy commitment.

I can understand using the travel idea as a way to decide which language to learn, but it isn’t always the way to go for me.

Additionally Twain is talking about the German language of 1880. Believe me, quite something has happened since then…

“I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was an “exception” which permits one to say “wegen den Regen” in certain peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not extended to anything but rain.”
(4. paragraph)

Now this is so stupid… “wegen den Regen”? “wegen” always needs a genitive so it’s either “wegen des Regens” (singular) or “wegen der Regen” (plural), though the latter would rather be “wegen der Regenfälle”, because it just sounds odd to say “Regen” meaning many rainfalls.

Alltogether I’d say, you’d better NOT read to much Mark Twain to receive information about German language. Most parts of it are just not true or exaggerated. I suppose the whole work isn’t even an objective view on German, but a more or less strange to nasty irony. The description of his own hard way to learn German exaggerated a lot, so more people find it interesting and read/buy his book.