Is learning a foreign language fun?

I came across this post, which asks: is language learning fun?

I personally find language learning exceptionally enjoyable and dreadfully frustrating at the same time. Anyone who has studied a language seriously probably knows what I mean. When you’re making progress, it’s a great feeling. It’s like finding a door into another universe and successfully picking the lock, because learning a foreign language lets you see the world through different lenses. Once you’re advanced enough, you actually have to begin thinking in the foreign language, because languages are never word-to-word translations. Experiencing the switch from thinking in one language to another is a bit of a rush, I think.

The other side of the coin is, of course, when you feel like you aren’t making any progress, or god forbid, you’re going backwards. It’s when you’ve read the chapter on the past tense subjunctive four times and you’re still not getting it. It’s when you’re consistently getting the words for embassy, businesses, and pinecones mixed up. “Ah, hello, have you been to the new pinecones downtown? They’re quite marvelous!” It is, basically, when the language you’re trying to learn says to you, “You, good sir (or madam), are far too dumb to learn me! Move on! Take up checkers, or perhaps counting pennies!” Every language learner experiences this, I think - many times. At least for me, my language learning experiences have always been a case of two steps forward, 1 step back.

Having said that, while language learning often drives me crazy, I keep going back to it. And, ultimately, it has to be because I find it enjoyable, because I have no real presure on me to learn them. I live in a small city in southern Ohio; do you know how many German speakers there are here? I haven’t ran into anyone yet. And Russian? I know of one person, and that person is the wife of one of my family members. (Which, come to think of it, will come in quite handy if I decide to stick with Russian…) Essentially, they serve no purpose other than letting me communicate in the language when I meet someone who uses it (or actively seek them out through a service like eTandem). And, after all, generally Germans know some English and will want to use it if you go to Germany. And Russians? I’ve read that generally they learn English extremely well. So, I can’t use the “I want to communicate with Germans and Russians” card, because I can already do that with English.

There is one other point to it, which I touched on a moment ago: they let you get a taste of the culture of a people unaltered by translation. Maybe that is the primary reason I keep going back to languages. Being a history geek, and, attached to that, a lover of foreign culture, languages are the key to the door. You can learn about a culture via your native tongue of course - you don’t have to learn ancient Greek to learn about ancient Greece, obviously - but you’d be amazed at how much you do learn about a culture by learning its native tongue.

So, what’s your take? Do you enjoy learning foreign languages? Do you hate it? Have you even tried it since you dropped out of that terrible French class in highschool?