Not easy to learn this language is

Although I dare not say I have quite 'mastered' the language yet, after years of study I find myself quite capable to at least understand most of it. Sometimes I even venture to speak a word, or a sentence, hoping it won't sound too much like nonsense or betray my lack of knowledge to the ears of a native speaker. Fluency in this language is not an absolute necessity for me, but understanding it is certainly not unimportant if I still want to be able to communicate with my boyfriend (for lack of a better word, or a ring! (ouch, nice one, if I may say so myself)).
But for his sake, of course I am prepared to improve my language skills. I even took a course in the past two weeks, which consisted of watching all six star wars movies in chronological order. It was more intensive than I imagined, and I fell asleep twice, but luckily my instructor offered to pause the dvd and resume watching the next day whenever things became too much for me to stay awake. On the whole, it was a real learning experience. Not only am I now able to grasp star wars related jokes, I learned that the quotation "Luke, I am your father" is not actually in the movie, Leia's bikini is not really golden and her hair is not in buns while wearing the bikini, and that Darth Vader's suit is actually a life-saving device, not a fashion statement as I always thought. I also learned that there is some systematicity to Yoda's annoyingly mangled syntax (it is the predicate complementing the verb which he moves to the front of the sentence, if you like I could draw you some tree diagrams), and that the dark side ain't so bad, although my instructor was not very happy about these last two observations. Nevertheless, I completed this course, I am still waiting for some sort of certificate though and I am beginning to suspect that my efforts are much underappreciated.
Meanwhile, my lessons in the dialect my boyfriend seems to be fluent in continue as he tries to use it in conversation with me on an almost daily basis. I think I know my way around words like co-op, first-person shooter and turn-based rpg's, and I know the difference now between things like graphics and game-design and I am even able to refer to games by name. However, the need to create or possess three identical Halo games (a guy in a suit who shoots at stuff) and the usefulness of an arcade-joystick thing for street fighter 2 (or 1, 5 or 7 I don't know) remain a mystery to me. I am trying to keep up though, and I must confess I did get a little excited when my boyfriend told me about some new mmo rpg where you can be a hero and create a costumized character with superpowers. But I think the best thing about all of this is that I can share this language with him now. Fortunately, whenever I have absolutely no clue what he is talking about, I am quite happy to just stare and nod, since he is considerably easy on the eyes to say the least.
This summer I plan to continue the study and brush up on comics, especially Elfquest since the last time I read it was about six years ago, and maybe Requiem, if there is time, because I am a slow reader. I suppose you can learn how to read comics quicker, it is probably something you can acquire, like hand-eye co-ordination (although I think myself more a mouth-eye co-ordination person since I never have any trouble eating everything I see).
Then, finally there is the language's orthographic system called l33t or something like it, but at the moment I don't see any reason why I should go into all that, since my boyfriend never uses it and I have no need to talk over the internet with nerds I don't even know.
As a linguist, I would say that this language certainly isn't the most difficult in the world, but may be quite difficult to learn if you are not a native speaker yourself; it is not in the nature of nerds to interact with other people as they generally live secluded lives behind their pc, xbox, stack of comics, or Darth Vader mask. And when you do encounter one of them, it is not likely that you will understand him, even less that he is prepared to explain and teach the language to an outsider. What makes things even more complicated is that sometimes you cannot tell whether someone is a nerd, until he meets another nerd and they start rambling to each other like two furbies placed within ten centimeter's distance. Therefore I know I am very fortunate to have a good mentor and I'd say that I am well on my way to understand, and one day perhaps fluently speak Nerd.