Reddit mentions of An Introduction to Language

As far as I know, the most popular introductory textbook is Fromkin's. You can get an older edition for cheaper. I studied with the 5th edition less than 3 years ago and it was fine. For something less unwieldy and more practical to carry around with you, Barry Blake's All About Language is really good. Less than 300 pages and manages to cover a huge amount of stuff clearly.

Personally, I think that historical linguistics is a really fun and relatively easy way to get into Linguistics as a whole so I'd recommend Trask's Historical Linguistics. I know that the Campbell and Crowley textbooks are also very popular, but I don't have personal experience with them. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on which is easiest for a beginner?

I have to plug my professor Kate Burridge here who has written some excellent pop-linguistics books: Gifts of the Gob, Weeds in the Garden of Words and Blooming English. Her more serious books are also written in a highly accessible manner and she is probably one of the world's experts on Euphemism and taboo. Here's a clip of her in action.

Some fun linguistics-related videos:

TED - The Uncanny Science of Linguistic Reconstruction

Pinker on Swearing

David Crystal on British tv

Another fun way to learn would be to listen to this song and look up all the terms used in it.

First up, I usually caution people interested in linguistics that the field is not necessarily what they think it is. I'd definitely recommend reading a bit first. This is the undergrad text book we used in my freshman year. It's a gentle, broad intro and as an added bonus it has cartoons! Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams.

Have you considered speech therapy? I used to know a speech therapist who derived tremendous satisfaction from his work -- working with people with stutters, people who'd had strokes etc. Lately I have heard of people coaching immigrants.

Not relevant to your question but you might get a kick out of it: a few people do art inspired by linguistics e.g. Sylwia Tur e.g. this piece.

I really like Fromkin and Rodman (find the latest ed here, though an older version would be an acceptable substitue). So much so that if I ever teach an intro to ling class and have my choice of textbook, that's probably where I'm headed.

What OP recommended, while solid, is, IIRC, a pretty heavy-lifting book, and it's just about one theoretical approach to syntax. You may find the Fromkin & Rodman book to be more broad (ranging from syntax and semantics to phonetics / morphology / phonology, with a dash of neuroling and some other fun stuff for good measure) and a quite approachable given your background work with languages in general.

I would recommend you pick up this book. It's a textbook, but it's easy to read and will serve as a great introduction.