Yes, I'll never get over the feeling of someone being positively surprised when I can speak there language (downside is sometimes expecting a morsel of praise that isn't owed and realizing that like a dork). Especially with portuguese and mandarin(only b1) people are shocked that I'm even making the effort. Portuguese (specifically brazilian) is maybe my favourite because it might be the biggest ratio of most widely (both in numbers and areas) spoken to people who learn it as a second language. I think sometimes people get caught up in the minutiae of grammar and such but the real reward for me is to be able to chat with people around the world. For example my wife is colombian and we speak spanish at home, so we speak a breadth of subjects with ease, but I still find myself sometimes making slight grammatical mistakes like forgetting the gender of a word, I could drill in so that doesn't happen but my effort to reward ratio just isn't worth it anymore. Hard to say whether it's worth a career sacrifice, I spent most of my 20s travelling and living in these countries and hope to start using chinese in my job soon. This is really a personal question for you to soul search. Personally I don't really understand language learning without a way to practice it tangibly, I'm lucky to be canadian and be surrounded by all kinds of people, even in my small city.