Not immensely useful unless you want to visit the former Yugoslavia but a fascinating and incredibly beautiful language. Newspapers in Serbo-Croatian are widely available all over Europe, as well as several TV channels.

Serbo-Croatian in itself does not have a high cultural aura such as French or Japanese. People will often wonder why you studied did. Are you from this part of the world? Did you marry there? If you do speak other slavic languages, however, the chic factor appears and you'll be seen as a well-travelled linguist rather than an arms dealer.

I rate this language as difficult to learn
along with virtually all other slavic languages, for the non-slavic speaker. Serbo-Croat has a system of seven cases each of which, in principle, changes with male/female/neuter, singular/plural, noun/adjective. However, in practice there is a lot of similarity between individual declensions and the number of combinations one needs to learn is greatly reduced (for example male and neuter nouns behave very similarly).

This is the most useful language in the world, no questions asked. Anyone having anything to do with other countries, be it in science, tourism, trade, finance or culture, will be extremely well rewarded if he masters the language decently. Most books are published in English, and most are translated in English. The best selling movies are American, and translation is a pain-in-the-ear. English, even bad, is the standard language of scientific publications, aviation, tourism, finance, and diplomacy. Anyway, if you're reading this, you are already sold to the language, so why insist?

Almost everybody claims to speak English, so I wonder where people can find any chic at all in this language. And yet. Some Germans are especially disconcerting when they show off their English and look back at their fellow Germans with a satisfied grin.

I rate this language as , that is, quite easy to learn, because of its ubiquity, and grammar. Almost everyone will tolerate a bad English if they still understand you, and anyway they will have heard so much of it by the time you talk to them that they won't mind. In most parts of the world, you only have to go to the cinema, open the TV or buy newspapers to have the language imposed on you so there's really no excuse for not speaking it at least decently.