On learning languages (for pleasure)

What's your foreign language of choice? I don't mean the language you are learning for pragmatic reasons: school, work, foreign partner. The usual.  

I mean the language that sounds so beautiful/cute/sensual to you that you want to partake in its melody; feel the words roll off your tongue and become sentences. Communication becomes blissful: you cherish the fact that you can now buy bread in your favourite language and that you can understand what those lucky native speakers are saying to you. 

Maybe you love this language's culture, or maybe you have once visited the country where it is spoken and fell in love with it. Such love affairs usually last a lifetime. 

Italian is such a language for me. English is a different story altogether. I love English, always have,  always will. But English is the language of work: teaching and writing. There is always a pragmatic aspect to it for me, always an agenda.  To Italian there is none. 

I fell in love with Italian when I first visited the country as a student. Before Italian, I thought that French would be my language of choice. But there was always an agenda to French. I had to learn it at school and then at university. I even remember talking about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in French for my final language exam.  As an English-Philology student, I was expected to discuss something related to my degree in  French....There you go, always an agenda, a purpose. And there was no one to talk to in French. It is no wonder that when Italian came into my life, French took a (French) leave. It just disappeared and has never really cared to come back. 

My Italian is not great. I can speak it more or less fluently but I make a lot of mistakes and  I can never get my subjunctive right. Surprisingly even for myself, I don't care. I have a one-hour private class every week with a lovely Italian native speaker. Most of the time, I don't have time to do my homework and almost every week I think about giving up. But then it's time for my weekly lesson and I just plunge in and feel happy again. With the kind of intrinsic happiness that only comes from doing things that are not necessary.