Any estimate as to how many times easier Esperanto is than a foreign national language (for the adult learner) has to be qualified by a specification of the learning stage you are talking about.

In the beginning the ratio is quite high, actually very high. As you progress the ratio falls.

When there is an aspect of language that takes just seconds or minutes to master when learning Esperanto and this same aspect in the foreign language takes months or years - and native speakers of that language may even never master it completely - then obviously Esperanto can be 100 or 1000 or 10,000 times easier.

Esperanto for Americans is about 3 times faster to learn to speak than British English

Tempodivalse:This is true especially for many monolingual English speakers today, who have no experience with declensions

It is not the case with pronouns: "I beat him" vs "he beats me". So I wonder why esperanto methods don't begin with such sentences as examples to explain accusative.

Altebrilas:It is not the case with pronouns: "I beat him" vs "he beats me". So I wonder why esperanto methods don't begin with such sentences as examples to explain accusative.

Fair enough. But most people probably don't ever pay attention to this little inflection. Native speakers very frequently make mistakes even here! For example: almost nobody knows the correct usage of "whom"; "me" is frequently used incorrectly in sentences like "It is me", "They and me", et cetera.

I feel that, of all monolinguals, the English-speaking ones are at the greatest disadvantage when learning a new language. In my experience with komencantoj, the Romance- and Slavic-language learners seemed to most readily grasp more technical grammatical concepts, while angloparolantoj often struggle just to separate infinitives from active voice or participles. I think it's because in English, these concepts are all blurred together. For instance, the word "greeting" can, depending on context, be an adjectival participle, adverbial participle, gerund (i.e. infinitive), or noun. There is no way to differentiate between the possibilities by looking at the ending, like in Slavic and Romance languages, and when speakers are forced to do so in EO, confusion results.

sudanglo:

url=http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:French_spelling_reforms_of_1990]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:French_spelling_reforms_of_1990[/url]

What a nightmare. I pity all those spell-checking programs.

Worry not. The French Hunspell spell checker performs very well. It is better maintained than the English one from my experience. It of course takes into account the 1990 reform (or not, user can choose variants of the dictionary).