Helen Fryer gave this advice in her textbook 105 years ago; it may sound quaint when read nowadays, but I find it clear and straighforward, good advice. More or less 'don't overthink it, just imagine it and live it'. The textbook is at gutenberg.org.

Helen Fryer:The student is strongly advised to cultivate the habit of thinking in Esperanto from the very beginning of the study. To do this he should try to realise the idea mentally without putting it into English words, e.g., when learning the word "rozo" or "kolombo," let him bring the object itself before his mind's eye, instead of repeating "'rozo', rose; 'kolombo', pigeon"; or with the sentence "'la suno brilas', the sun shines," let him picture the sun shining.

xdzt, part of your problem may be the same as what was troubling me. You may just not be confident about using the Esperanto knowledge that you already have.

erinja and RiotNrrd both told me to simply get more practice with writing in Esperanto. I was advised to obtain Kellerman's "A Complete Grammar of Esperanto" and to take Lernu's Kio okazas course. I am working on both solutions. Also, sudanglo's 19-page 'Translation competitions' (found here at http://en.lernu.net/komunikado/forumo/temo.php?t=8..., begun on 01-14-2011) is proving to be helpful.

I liked his little joke:
A: Are you religious?
B: I believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Father Christmas, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

After reading the responses, I settled on this:
A: Ĉu vi estas religiema?
B: Nu mi kredas je la Dentfeino, la Paskan Kunikleton, kaj la Patron Kristnasko. Sed ni devas limigi nin ie.

I learned several new words from that one joke.

There's some other good ones on this thread. One from "To Kill A Mockingbird", another from The Magician series by Raymond Feist, etc.

sudanglo also said in one of his posts that we all need to develop his/her own style of writing. We do it in our native language. It makes sense to do it in Esperanto.

IMO, you don't need to download all sorts of software to learn vocabulary. I indicated in another thread that I don't care to make a lot of changes in my computer for learning and using Esperanto. It just isn't necessary.

Also, just to stir the pot a bit, there are some posts here about how Esperanto is so unfair to other languages, etc, etc, etc. Well, I am not a Darwinist. I leave that to those professing to be Liberals. But Darwin wrote about survival of the fittest and I presume he believed what he wrote about. If a language is almost dead, if it has only a handful of speakers left, why accuse Esperanto, or English, or Spanish or any other language of killing it. We cannot prevent it from happening. Why make a "wailing wall" issue of it?

I, too, have been doing many of the same things as you. It seems that perhaps I was worrying over nothing. I tried learning from Kellerman's book during a previous attempt, and it didn't work too well (for me) given the denseness of information there -- but perhaps now that I'm more thoroughly entrenched, it will be more useful to me.

As for using software to learn vocabulary -- I agree that you can learn vocabulary in a more passive, traditional sense, but I absolutely see the utility in increasing vocabulary as quickly as possible. For me, personally, I can read and understand just about anything I encounter in Esperanto provided I'm familiar with the vocabulary -- often there are grammatical constructs which I need to consider, but usually I can figure it out without consulting a reference. Throw a new word in there, though, and suddenly things become much more opaque. For this reason alone, I see it as being useful to develop vocabulary independently and as quickly as possible. Plus, websites like Memrise allow you to do vocabulary drills at any time, on any computer.

quieta:Also, just to stir the pot a bit, there are some posts here about how Esperanto is so unfair to other languages, etc, etc, etc. Well, I am not a Darwinist. I leave that to those professing to be Liberals. But Darwin wrote about survival of the fittest and I presume he believed what he wrote about. If a language is almost dead, if it has only a handful of speakers left, why accuse Esperanto, or English, or Spanish or any other language of killing it. We cannot prevent it from happening. Why make a "wailing wall" issue of it?

What do you mean by 'not a Darwinist'? As I understand it, a 'darwinist' is simply somebody who subscribes to evolutionary theories -- and therefore you can't be 'not a Darwinist' anymore than you can be 'not a sky-is-blue-ist' or 'not an earth-is-round-ist'. Clearly, there must be a local meaning that neither I nor my quick google search is familiar with.

As for your comments regarding the eradication of language, I think I'm mostly in agreement, though I'm not sure how it relates to this thread. I think preservation of language is important, in the sense of cataloging them, but trying to preserve them in the sense of maintaining and active body of speakers seems to be an impossible and pointless task.

xdzt:What do you mean by 'not a Darwinist'? As I understand it, a 'darwinist' is simply somebody who subscribes to evolutionary theories -- and therefore you can't be 'not a Darwinist' anymore than you can be 'not a sky-is-blue-ist' or 'not an earth-is-round-ist'.

You appear to be unfamiliar with the United States.

This is NOT an appropriate venue in which to debate the merits of science vs religion*. But to put some context to your questions, you should be aware that in the US there are many people who flat-out reject the theory of evolution in preference to prescientific theological writings from the Roman and Egyptian periods.

While not in the majority, you should be aware that they are not an insignificant minority.

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* The Esperanto-language forums ARE appropriate venues, however. As long as everything is written in Esperanto.

The Americans are a very strange people, xdzt. Have you ever listened to that excellent and very witty Radio 4 programme 'The Unbelievable Truth'.

They often slip in some piece of American State law challenging the credulity of the panellists. So often, it turns out that the State in question does actually have that law, and you just cannot believe it.

Also, I've heard that some amazingly high percentage of the US population believe they have been abducted by aliens at some time in their lives!

These comments on "How Americans think" are off-topic here, and would better be moved to on eof the Esperanto forums for those who wish to further discuss them./

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On the vocabulary front, I have heard of people having very good luck with reading a text and writing down every single word they don't know, and putting those words into a memory program and learning them, if you really like the idea of using a memory program.

For me, personally, I never made a concerted effort to learn a lot of vocabulary. Personal correspondence was a great way to learn words that are important to me, because to talk about things that interest me, I needed words for those things, so I looked them up and gradually learned them.

I did have one deck of paper flashcards as a beginner, never used a program. The paper deck contained important words that I needed to know but was unlikely to be using every day. Days of the week, months of the year, body parts, etc. I suspect you know all of those by now. Everything else I learned through actually using the language, writing messages and reading the messages of others.

erinja:
On the vocabulary front, I have heard of people having very good luck with reading a text and writing down every single word they don't know, and putting those words into a memory program and learning them, if you really like the idea of using a memory program.

A number of years ago I read a book by the scholar Cyrus Gordon (sorry, I no longer remember the title) in which he wrote about his own experiences in learning languages. He wrote that if he wanted to learn a new language, he would take a quality book in that language and go over the first twenty pages of it. Slowly, slowly, he would make sure he understood *EVERYTHING* in those first twenty pages: all the vocabulary, all the grammar, everything. After that he could read most everything except for the occasional new vocabulary item. I haven't tried his method, but it seems reasonable to me that there might be something to it. For Esperanto, of course, it would be a matter of finding a "quality" book from a respected author using a variety of vocabulary and constructions.

I suggest that beginners read the E-language forums. If they are really stumped, they can send a message to the writer privately under Novaj mesaĝoj. I have no problem linking new vocab in a target language to certain elements of languages that I already know - but as Sudanglo rightly points out, words in one language may have many different meanings - for example the English word "hand" - He asked for her hand in marriage - I was dealt a bad hand - Hand me the sugar - all hands on deck, etc.

xdzt:I'd like to be able to review Esperanto words without inextricably tying them in my mind to their English equivalents, but I haven't come up with any good alternatives..I've considered using Esperanto definitions..I worry that I'll just associate the two without really absorbing the meaning.

You may find more interesting the mini-vortaroj at the end of articles in Juna Amiko (past issues of which you can often pick up cheaply at Esperanto events).

My advice is to start simple. Complicated ideas are hard to form without translating, especially when you are beginning. Try forming less complicated sentences and slowly work your way into more complicated ideas. It can be as simple as looking out your window- "Trans la strato estas domo. Ĝi estas blanka kun nigra tegmento. Ĝi havas grandan fenestron apud la pordo. Antaŭ ĝi estas arbo kaj kelkaj arbetoj kaj floroj...etc." If you practice like this it slowly gets easier to avoid translating your thoughts into English, even as the ideas become ever more complex.