In the time it took Eisenbrauns to actually publish it (it was delayed something like two years) the credit card I had used to place the pre-order expired and when they asked for updated information to complete the order to avoid it being canceled, it just let it get canceled.

At a certain point you have to recognize you're only going to be able to learn so many languages, and adding one more is done at the cost of neglecting another.

Translations are a necessary evil for most people and I don't fault people for reading good books in translation - Hell, 95% of the world would never read 95% of the classics (okay, that's a made-up statistic, but probably close to the truth) if we all had to read them in the original. No one would read Homer or Virgil anymore, and Dante would be out of bounds for most people.

I just personally decided that, since I enjoy learning languages and seem to pick them up fairly easily, I owed it to myself to read as much in the original languages as possible. For the most part, I think I can. I use English and Russian on a daily basis in both written and spoken form, and by extension I can understand Ukrainian since it is so close - you really only have to learn about 1,000 root words that differ enough from Russian to not be immediately recognizable (праця means "work" in Ukrainian, for example, when the Russian word is работа). I also studied Spanish and Latin in high school and continued with the Latin more than the Spanish, oddly. I took three years of college-level Mandarin and there was a time when it was damn good, but it's gotten rusty from lack of use. I also have worked on French and German to the point I can read them without a dictionary and understand everything if spoken at a moderate speed, though my active capabilities are lower through lack of spoken language use.

Then there are a few dead languages I can read - Classical Greek, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic pretty much without a dictionary, Egyptian very slowly, Coptic very slowly, Akkadian if I really try hard, and enough Sumerian to read simple inscriptions.

Anything else has just been dabbling.