I, for one, am not a person who seeks only the goal on intercomprehension when I learn a language as choosing and learning a language merely for its usefulness seems to me like the doom of any and every language. Usefulness doesn't allow any space for diversity and only entitles one to learn what he needs (a necessity rather than an interest) in order to put a crutch beneath his crippled babbling. Let's not cook an egg without its yolk : a language is a world in it's own, we need to learn how to think again with every new one, it's a way to speak, act, react, agree, disagree and so much more, more than the sum of its parts and yet inseparable from any of its intricacies. languages help me to communicate, mostly on the internet, but the opportunity to know one offers me much more, being able to discover new activities or eavesdrop on a conversation between soviet spies for exemple, or read books I couldn't read before. The challenges are many, especially in the first steps you make, you might feel like an idiot that can't lay a word before the other but with effort ( and much , much suffering ) a good footing is only fistfuls of words away and no matter how many speakers there are , every language are equal and worth learning, even that dusty old Latin.
