orthohawk:I suspect that one reason for people dropping it after starting is that they started in the first place because of the hype of Esperantists themselves about the ease of learning getting exaggerated into "instantaneous recognition" a la Interlingua for speakers of Romance languages, and they discover it isn't and give up in disgust and distrust.

Yes, I imagine that's not an uncommon scenario. It's easy to oversell the "easy" of Esperanto. I try very hard not to make this mistake, on the (rare) occasions when I talk about Esperanto to non-Esperantists. When you tell people a language is easy, I think many expect it to be as easy as pig-Latin. I just say that I was able, in Esperanto, to surpass my level of comprehension and expression in French, in a fraction of the time that I spent studying French, and leave it at that. It's true, but it doesn't convey the idea that learning Esperanto is effortless.

Any assertion that Esperanto is easy has to be qualified with the idea of level to be attained.

The facts are that in the initial phase of learning Esperanto is not just 10 or 5 times easier to learn than a national language. It is many orders of magnitude easier. The new student can learn to form the past, present and future of any verb (and for all subjects) in less than 60 seconds, and to boot can grasp the principle that they can make anything into a verb provided it makes sense.

That might be reasonably several thousand times easier in comparison to a language like French. The same could be said of learning to spell correctly in Esperanto in compared to achieving that goal in English.

However, the further you progress into Esperanto, the more the gap narrows between Esperanto and the national languages. At the highest level, there is a special difficulty and that is that there aren't the TV programmes, the films, the newspapers and the availability of fluent speakers, from which the language can just be absorbed.

However, when Esperanto is commonly in daily use for all the media purposes of the modern world, then you will be able to say without fear of contradiction that Esperanto is the easiest language on the planet, whilst at the same time being one of the most sophisticated.

RE: proper nouns/foreign words

I didn't specify enough, and Erinja is right that if a proper noun is esperantized then there's not really a problem. However, I think there's a debate about whether or not to even Esperantize things. See: Facebook? Fejsbuko? Vizaĵlibro? Facebook-o?

On the last note there, another interesting thing that I've noticed is that while sometimes the added -on/ojn/ is done for foreign words, I don't think I've really seen it for the nomitive case. Which makes sense in that a foreign word is going to probably be a noun, but it's interesting how it's not seen as bad in anyway.

Which is what I would like to say about all this really. Personally, I'm not looking to reform Esperanto or anything like that, just reflecting on the questions asked by the OP. I find it interesting, without saying that it's grounds for making changes, that not having the accusitive in some cases is in fact okay. Furthermore, in these accusitiveless foreign words, because their nomitive case is not (or at least rarely) marked either they could be confused for the subject, according to the rules of Esperanto at any case.

kefga_x:RE: proper nouns/foreign words

I didn't specify enough, and Erinja is right that if a proper noun is esperantized then there's not really a problem. However, I think there's a debate about whether or not to even Esperantize things. See: Facebook? Fejsbuko? Vizaĵlibro? Facebook-o?

Yes, that's an ongoing debate. The trend seems to be that the proper name already has such international recognition that eventually it gets Esperantized phonetically, like Guglo, but "Google", unlike "FaceBook", can't be rendered semantically.
Interestingly, "Fejsbuk" already has traction in some Slavic languages.

T0dd:Yes, that's an ongoing debate. The trend seems to be that the proper name already has such international recognition that eventually it gets Esperantized phonetically, like Guglo, but "Google", unlike "FaceBook", can't be rendered semantically.
Interestingly, "Fejsbuk" already has traction in some Slavic languages.

The English spelling is weird, so it is necessary to write those words accordingly to the Esperanto spelling. It is true, that some Slavic languages took a few English words, but as far as the Polish is considered, their spelling was mostly changed to be readable in the target language:

interface --- interfejs
joystick --- dżojstik
computer --- komputer
facebook - fejsbuk
dollar -- dolar
pendrive - pendrajw
...

hebda999:
facebook - fejsbuk

Yes, that's how it seems... :/

kefga_x:Furthermore, in these accusitiveless foreign words, because their nomitive case is not (or at least rarely) marked either they could be confused for the subject, according to the rules of Esperanto at any case.

Confusion or uncertainty is only possible if both the subject and the object are foreign words, which is a relatively unusual situation. If either the subject or the object is a 'native' Esperanto word, then of course the process of elimination would tell you the subject and object, independent of word order. If the Esperanto word has -o only then the foreign word is the object, if the Esperanto word has -n then the foreign word is the subject.

(I have been out of things for a few days, so I am just now catching up on some threads.)

T0dd:That's true. I think there are people who do give up on Esperanto because they can't master details of the grammar, but I also think that all or most of these people are unable to cope with grammar in general, not just this or that detail. If a language isn't a grammatical copy of their native language (and it never is), they just don't get it.

I've seen people who never, ever get that it's possible to convey the present tense in another language without literally translating the English "I am X-ing" progressive form. We all struggle to break out of the bonds of our native language, but some people seem just about incapable of it. I hate to be so pessimistic, but that's my experience.

This is one of the best summaries I have seen in a long time on this issue. I recall my first year high school (USA) French class over fifty years ago in which some students seemingly just could not get it through their heads why "Je suis allant" is not perfectly good French.

I have seen in other constructed auxiliary languages that some advocates want to "pull" the language in the direction of their native tongues. "My language has feature X; therefore, any respectable constructed auxiliary language must have it." (E.g., some users of Interlingua seemingly wanting to make it into Yet Another Romance Language, or would-be proponents of Lingua Franca Nova seemingly baffled how any a language could possibly operate adequately without a morphological subjunctive. I have read such discussions.)

Long ago, when I first came into awareness of Esperanto in any degree at all (although I confess I have never fully mastered it), I, too, thought that this or that feature ought to be abolished or changed. Now I have changed my opinion. Yes, if I were designing E-o from scratch, I would probably not put certain features into it. However, given the language as it is and as it has been for a century and a quarter, I accept it as it is, warts and all. T0dd is right. There are some people who will just not "get it," whatever "it" might be with any language, natural or constructed. When it comes to adult learners, the blunt fact is that there are some people who will never become proficient.

darkweasel:

hebda999:
facebook - fejsbuk

Yes, that's how it seems... :/

Yes, it certainly seems so, I know my language better than you do:

fejsbuk!

"facebook" is treated by Poles as a foreign word!