When I was 10, I created a very large game called City Empires.  Part of that game was a language called "Arkelian" which I created by adopting Zulu with my own invention.  It didn't realize than that I had a natural ability with languages.  To me, language is code and code is language.  Once I became a computer scientist I renewed my desire for language by studying German.  After my exploits to eastern Europe, learning Russian has been my latest challenge impossible to resist.

Computer languages have many properties of a real spoken language, but, they are not as nearly difficult to learn.  After having learned eleven computer languages, I'm still hungry for more and encourage projects which require me to master yet another.

The most interesting self-learned lesson I discovered was the link which both spoken and computer languages share.  Each language learned makes the next language easier to adopt.  It seems that humans really can only communicate in a limited capacity; the encoding used however varies greatly.