erinja:I think there's a balance to be struck. I would hate to get to lesson 7 of a language course and not know how to say "hello" or "thank you". I think this is a question people want to know, "How do I say hello in this language?".

Rossetta Stone! (Cough, cough)

Totaly unrelated, but I'll Brb, I can't stop smacking my face at the fact that ppl dispose of hundreds of $$$ in a questionable software that takes over 5 hours to teach you how to say, "there's a dog under the table" before anything useful.

Esperanto never struck me as “too hard”. I started by looking at the beautifully illustrated Chinese magazine El Popola Ĉinio whose peranto was my brother-in-law, or rather, at the time, my sister's boyfriend, and I noticed that I understood maybe 80% to 90% of what was written, even before I had started to formally “learn” the language. I may or may not have looked at one of the ŝlosiloj he was giving around (from a booth at the Red Flag fair and in similar circumstances) but these looked more like a memory aid than like a serious grammar. Then in the English library downtown I saw a book titled Teach Yourself Esperanto, and I thought, “Why not? If it's as easy as it seems to be, it should be a breeze, and if not, at least I'll know it firsthand.” (English is not my mother language, by the way, and that was long before everyone —or almost— had a computer.)

One thing that I loved was the possibility to build new words at will by combining existing elements: so today it often happens that the Esperanto word comes to my mind before the word in my native language (French), or that I can do a better translation into Esperanto than into French.

Of course, as the saying goes, “your mileage may vary”.