I love learning German. I wish the American education system was such that languages were taught much earlier. Leo the Russian knows about five languages: Russian, English, Spanish, French, and Italian, and actually this is the case with most of my English Is Not My First Language friends.
Americans, however, seem to be totally ignorant of languages. They took a year or two of Spanish in high school, and can say "I speak a little Spanish", "I don't like it," and the ever useful "My pants are on fire." Whoop de shit. I do make exception for Friend Kally who was learning French and Spanish at the same time whilst trying to teach herself German, but she passionately wanted to be a linguist. (And last I knew was accomplishing that goal down in Oklahoma.)
The thing of it is, since our neighbors are Pastey All-Americans just like us, we don't bother to learn how to speak to our Romantic cousins or our Anglo Saxon brothers or, most scary of them all, our Arabic ancestors. All of these languages have helped to feed and shape our own. Our language is our culture, and to understand the culture of another we need to understand their language.
There are certain Native American tribes whose languages relate directly to the land around them. Their language is based on the understanding of their immediate environment. Samoan people were used in World War II as coders because at that time literally the only person who could understand Samoan was another Samoan. For this same reason Japanese codes were notoriously easy to decifer because they assumed no one but another Japanese would know their language (unfortunately they weren't as lucky as the Samoans in this assumption).
I love language because I love theatre because I love literature. These things are all related to who and what we are, and if knowing a little bit about a language helps us understand somebody else a little better, doesn't that make the world a smaller, friendlier place?
I watched Darby O Gill and the Little People for the first time last night since I was about four years old. I was amazed to discover jut how much of the movie I remembered. But what surprised me even more was the Gaelic that turns up in the movie from time to time. Guildenstern is right when he says Gaelic is not in any way an elegant language, but it has a sound to it different from anything I ever cognisantly heard (it never dawned on me at age four, I guess). Now, on top of German and Welsh I want to learn Gaelic too. There must be a way I could teach myself.