E. Books, songs, movies and culture

Knowing a foreign language is the perfect way to understand a people, and a passionating way to do this is to dwelve into its culture. There are great cultures out there, with incredible books, poetry, songs, theatre, movies and jokes that loose most of  their strength when translated. Moreover, many are accessible either through bookshops, TV, radio or directly trough the internet. Many people don't imagine what you can learn about a country by reading its jokes, and there are loads of it for your use on the internet.
So the thing you'll want to ask when considering a language is : what kind of culture is there in this language, and can I get it? English or spanish culture is easy to find for most people, but few are those who can find iranian or thai books and movies.
Great languages on this criteria are spanish, french, english, chinese, italian, arabic, japanese etc...