[imranq]

I would work backwards from why you want to learn a new language in the first place. Definitely spend some time on that. Usually the reason will lead directly to a project that you want to work on. Otherwise it will be hard to follow through.

Ex: I wanted to learn C, but my reasoning was only that it seemed like "real" programmers knew it. But that's not a good reason. Instead what I really wanted was to get closer to hardware and build software that did low-level operations. So I learned objective C and build audio-processing software for iOS that I actually wanted to work on. So I was able to learn a bit of the language and a bunch of other cool things that I still use today.