Not just German - any language! I know Spanish fluently and am a notch below marginal in French. However, German was a language that, unlike Spanish or French, was not simply taught to me in school. One day I was bored and figured I needed a new hobby. So I went to a bookstore and caught the section on dictionaries and foreign travel. I started ruffling through the Berlitz books on all the different languages available and figured German would be challenging though useful if I could learn it... and not as pointlessly challenging, on the other hand, as learning, say, Nepalese or Icelandic.

In college I was a couple of classes short of minoring in German though I never actually became fluent. Coming by german-speaking people here in the States is a rarity and like they say, if you don't use it you lose it; c'est la vie! (In German I guess you'd say So ist das Leben but it doesn't exactly roll off your tongue, does it?)