How did you learn your favorite programming language?

By chance! I was working in a company that needed a mail templating that could send a large amount (yeah... I learned it was spam alike after) And one of my coworker came with a solution of programming by actors with Akka actors, based on scala. So to help this coworker maintaining and evolving this application, I learn the language and the concepts under the language. Now I chose my current job partly for the language (and because there is a strong connection with open source contribution)