I have an odd assortment of foreign language books I know I'll never read. So why do I have them? I find them in thrift stores, they look interesting, they're dirt cheap, and so I buy them. Some of the more interesting ones are Jurassic Park in Japanese, a biography of Gogol in Russian, a book in Afrikaans (a grammar?) called Afrikaans Speel-Speel Leer, and a slipcased Japanese/Italian dictionary. I've got a pile of others. My personal favorite is a peculiar learn-to-read-English book in Korean. The bulk of the volume is in Korean, but it's littered with English vocabulary words and sentences. When flipping through it one day I found the following jaw-dropping sentence, "The girl farted, and everybody laughed." This sentence would be easier to ignore if the whole book were filled with similar examples, but it's not. The sentences are for the most part the usual bland stuff like, "He grew old" and "Half-boiled egg digests well." Maybe if we'd learned more useful words and sentences in high school French I would've paid more attention.

Years ago I used to listen to a lot of shortwave broadcasts from different countries. Many of these stations featured programs on how to learn to speak their native languages. I would listen to these things, but mainly I'd daydream. On occasion an odd sentence would stand out and make me wonder when they thought that sentence would come in handy. The best example was from the Voice of Free China from Taiwan. The scenario was that two women were watching a man in a restaurant who was eating everything in sight. One of the women said, "Look at the way he's staring at that sweet and sour pork." In the years since (and this was in the mid 80's probably) I daydreamed of learning that sentence, flying to Taipei, and just walking around saying it to random people.