I spent three months at the beginning of this year learning Esperanto. This is the first time I speak about it in a detailed way.<p>My motivation was manifold: I somehow couldn't manage to learn the language of the country I was currently living in, so I wanted to try a simpler one; I was curious about Esperanto ever since I was a child; I was fed up with people learning languages because of job-related issues or infatuation with the culture (yes, they bothered me equally); I wanted to have a hobby that didn't involve my work or my friends.<p>My path was as follows (I am writing this as general advice for a potential learner): I first did the whole Duolingo tree, working ~2 hours per day, which took me a month, then I read the novel for beginners Gerda Malaperis by Claude Piron which everyone recommends (there was only one or two words in it which I didn't already know from Duolingo), then I read for a few weeks from Piron's Vere aŭ fantazie. This is a very nice book of stories (a work of genius, I may say) which is written carefully as to start from a limited vocabulary (smaller than Gerda, since it also aims at learners which started with other texts) and then to slowly add 8-10 new words in every chapter. I read one story per day, underlining words I didn't recognize (not caring whether I had learned them before or they were actually new) and then looking them up in a dictionary. When I finished the story, I reread the sentences which contained the underlined words. Then, the next day, I reread the last day's story before embraking on a new one. This way one slowly absorbs (almost without realizing it) a whole lot of new vocabulary. I would love to see someone doing this kind of project in a non-constructed language. After finishing that book, I started reading from Boris Kolker's Vojaĝo en Esperanto-lando, usually presented as an advanced reader, one chapter a day (I think it has three-four new words per chapter), which I abandoned somewhere in the middle.<p>At the end of it, I could read an advanced book written in Esperanto which felt enough like an achievement. I don't know about conversational skills, since I never talked to anyone. But even if I initially hated culture-related motivations, I longed for having a country and a culture to read about and apply my skills. I found the same problems that wccrawford is complaining about in another comment - almost no media produced in Esperanto got my attention.<p>There is some stuff I like about it: it sounds very cosy (even the sentences I read on the blog post above); the fixed endings make it easy to parse a sentence even if you don't know what the words mean; it has very powerful means of enriching its own vocabulary (when I was a child, I loved English because of this, let's say in this regard English is to Esperanto as Unix is to Plan 9 with regard to the Unix philosophy, so it kinda rekindled that enthusiasm). I recommend it to anyone identifying with at least one of my motivations above.