Tomo S. Vulpo:There is even an essay entitled "Learn not to speak Esperanto,"

I think you are referring to J. B. Rye's ranto. I found many good points in it. I also followed a conversation between a good friend of mine (also a very fluent esperantist) and Mr. Rye himself. Nobody "won" but it was pretty evident to me that mr. Rye does not hate esperanto, he just believes that it is a poor attempt at what it aims to achieve and that it could have been designed to be better and more consistent, which is of course true but most esperanto speakers do not actually care... as much as they might advertise it to be better than how it actually is.

All this happened between 1998 and 1999, perhaps things have changed now.

mnlg:

Tomo S. Vulpo:There is even an essay entitled "Learn not to speak Esperanto,"

I think you are referring to J. B. Rye's ranto..

Claude Piron wrote a reply to Rye's ranto, which will be worthwhile reading for apologists.

Tomo S. Vulpo skribis:

"Seriously, if the language was really as bad as you make it out to be.."

Miland skribis:

"Who's the 'you' that you are referring to? Perhaps you meant to say 'they', but you were thinking in German, in which the word sie is used for both 'you' and 'they'?"

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I'm a native English speaker (more or less, lol) and i often find myself also talking like this, using the "you" when referring to others, It's kind of like a direct response, like the person is imagining they are talking directly to the other person. True it's probably not good to talk like that since it can be unclear, but i often find myself doing that, and i don't even speak German.