Reasons for choosing the foreign language you have picked

[brilliantyears]

It also literally doesn't matter to which "back end of nowhere" you go, you will always meet at least one Dutch person (and even meeting only one and no more than one is rare...)
There are literally only 17 million of us. How can they be everywhere at the same time?!

[NoManches]

I'll try to make this short:

When I was a kid I always wanted to learn a foreign language because I thought it was cool. My dad was in the military and during his travels he became conversational in a few different languages. I thought this was super cool and wanted to do the same thing. In high school I was "forced" to take a few Spanish classes. I HATED them. Those classes made me think language learning was the most miserable thing in the world. Plus, there were hardly any Spanish speakers where I lived so there wasn't a practical reason for me to learn Spanish ("I'll never use Spanish in real life" is something I told my teacher a few times).

A few years later I'm living near the US / Mexico border and taking college courses. In order to graduate I need to take 3 semesters of a foreign language. Spanish is being used all around me, all the time. The street names are in Spanish and the stores have signs in Spanish. Many of my friends in college were bilingual (they would switch from Spanish to English all the time mid sentence). At work I found the need to speak Spanish was a daily occurrence. And of course, I wanted to travel. I was starting to go on trips to Mexico but not being able to speak Spanish in Mexico (even in a border town) was kind of sketchy.

That was all the reason I needed to choose Spanish as my language of study in college. It's funny because in highschool I took 3 Spanish classes that I absolutely hated and I BARELY passed them (I have the report card to prove it!). In college I took the minimum 3 Spanish classes and that wasn't enough. I then took a grammer class for Spanish "heritage speakers" and had one of the top grades in the class, even though I was only one of the 2 "gringos" in the class. I ended up taking two more classes 100% in Spanish that were designed for native speakers. And to finish it all, I worked on two research projects in Mexico.

After my first semester of Spanish in college, I just fell in love with the language and couldn't stop studying it. Now, it is the ability to immerse myself in another language and experience a new culture that keeps my motivation high and makes me determined to reach "native like fluency" one day...

[Christopher]

It was Mireille from French in Action. I'll admit it.
Out of the blue, I saw her one morning on PBS.
She had me from « Commençons par mes parents»...

[aaleks]

I wanted to learn English since elementary school just because my older cousins were studying the language in school. English was one more things they knew and I didn't. But in my school English wasn't an option, we had to choose between German and French. I chose German, and when the language lessons started pretty fast came to conclusion that language learning is very boring and very difficult, and that it's impossible for me to learn any foreign language. Then the 90's came. Back then a significant part of tv-content in Russian were series, movies, cartoons from, seemed, all over the world, and of course a significant part of that part were English-speaking shows (although not only American). They simply became a part of my teenage life. The first more or less seriouse attempt to learn English (on my own) I made in the eary 2000s but it didn't last long. And then, almost 6 ago I decided to try again. But I was mostly interested in reading books and watching tv-shows, movies, etc. So when I'm thinking about what language I'd like to learn I don't take into account a possibility to meet a native speaker of the language. And there still is the Internet anyway .