Travel dilemmas: Learning another language is so fun it's embarrassing

A reader recently wrote to ask about a language-immersion program. How in the world do you narrow your choices and figure out whether that program is right for you? Will the Spanish you learn in Mexico be comprehensible in Spain and vice versa? What if you make horrible mistakes and embarrass yourself?

Learning a second language puts you in good company these days, Francois Grosjean wrote in Psychology Today: In 1980, about 11 percent of the U.S. population was bilingual. Today it's nearly double that.

"The position of prominence that English