Esperanto was the first (beyond my native, obviously) language I learned about twenty years ago. What I enjoyed about it then (and still do today, although I've

Esperanto was the first (beyond my native, obviously) language I learned about twenty years ago. What I enjoyed about it then (and still do today, although I've learned a couple of natural languages since) was that I could learn it to a useful level (as in reading novels without a dictionary) in probably a couple of hundred hours. I still haven't managed that in other languages with much more study even in ones where I have reasonable conversational ability. To use a hacker's analogy, learning a natural language is like learning C++, and learning Esperanto is like learning a scripting language like Ruby or Python.