<p>I've taken three years of high school german and am going to take a fourth, and it pains me to say, german is a dying language. At one point (and still somewhat today) german was the buisness language of europe. Now, it is steadily becoming english. As far as travel goes, if you know german and english you can get along in almost all of europe, (but be careful when you are in france.) Chineese is a very good language to learn, and so is japeneese, but they are harder because they use different alphabets, and their sounds are unlike english sounds. If you really want to go off the deep end you could learn aribic, they say it takes 10 years to become remotly fluent in the language, in comparison, i am close to fluent in german after three years. Aribic would be a good language to learn if you ever wanted to do something for the government.</p>