I begun reading the Vulgate a few years ago. I was picking up the Latin rather quickly, to be honest. Not nearly as difficult as I imagined; though knowing the text fairly well in English probably helped a lot with that. I’m sure if I had continued, I would’ve developed a decent grasp of Latin in general. Yes, I think one could learn a lot about a language from a contemporary, sense-for-sense Bible translation; the more literal translations are probably not good representations of any given language. However, there’s certainly a lot of modern, everyday vocabulary that’s missing from the Bible, as well as many, many terms that a non-Christian will have no use for.