Learning Languages; Indonesian

I met someone on a pen pal site from Indonesia, and I got interested in learning more about that country. Then, I was having a hard time getting writing done one day and thought about learning Indonesian. So I went to the Indonesian Wikipedia and looked around. I looked up some of the words that looked interesting, and tried using the random article function to explore. I found that I was learning that way.

Now doing that, or similar things, is a little bit of a habit, maybe 20 minutes a day. Indonesian is an easy language to learn, I think. I've tried learning (in descending order of how far I got:) Spanish, German, and Russian before, all of them through some kind of "official language learning" thing (school, cassette tapes, Duolingo). I realize now that that spirit takes the fun out of learning, and that it's better to do something inexpertly over and over over a long time period than to do things well for a while and then give up. If you keep your love for something, you can go far. I like freely exploring "all knowledge" (Indonesian Wikipedia) rather than learning practical things I would need as a tourist, or grammar. I guess someday I'll end up learning those things somehow.

Indonesian and Spanish are both spoken in the developing world, which interests me. Indonesia is the fourth-most-populous country in the world. Could climate change (or war?) send refugees to where I live who speak Indonesian or Spanish? Or maybe I could spend time in Indonesia, where the official religions include Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (as well as Christianity). If I ever get to the point in my life where I want to focus on non-Christian religions, that might be a good place to go. Or maybe I could go to Tijuana, which could be a day trip for me where I live, and speak Spanish there, or find someone where I live whose main language is Spanish. (Or I could interact with those languages' social media worlds.)

A saying that I read in The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson is "you overestimate what you can do in a year but underestimate what you can do in ten years". I don't think I'll be fluent in Indonesian anytime soon.

How serious am I about learning Indonesian? I tried to quit learning, and decided not to, and then I felt the interest coming back on its own. This is a sign to me to consider myself really on the way to learning the language.