Languages are pretty much my life. I've spent seven years learning French, although due to the lack of French people in my circle of friends my level of understanding is greater than my ability to produce. I'm studying Mandarin as my degree, and I am learning Cantonese and German on the side. You're right about the difficulty of self-teaching, and I can only really manage languages as a hobby because I have people who speak those languages in my life (My girlfriend, and my step mother, respectively), and because I have a good reason.
My interest in Bollywood has spurred me to try and learn Hindi a few times, but the horrendous paradigms and the lack of situations to practice or use it in has always pushed me back. I keep accidentally starting new languages because it is hard to control, but realistically I know that I need a proper environment to learn languages to the degree I want.