I tried it too, but eventually walked away from the endeavor. I found you really have to learn to think the "Esperanto way" of saying things. That's the tricky

I tried it too, but eventually walked away from the endeavor. I found you really have to learn to think the "Esperanto way" of saying things. That's the tricky part. At least, if I tried to communicate a more complex thought other than a general conversation, it wouldn't really be understood by the community, or at least be understandable, but just incorrect. To overcome this, I think I would have next had to emerge myself into more complex texts. For example, I had 1984 to read, but just never got round to it. The other thing was this personal relationship building thing the community embraces. I really am a loner so am not really into their general ideology. It really freaked me out when they wanted to meet me when visiting my town, or worse still, stay with me! That's the thing that actually really turned me off and made me ditch the whole idea. I've played with various languages over the years, including conlangs, and actually found Swedish to be my favorite. There are some hard parts, like the declensions of definite, indefinite, plural with its genders, but practicing general conversation with my wife (who is a native Finnish speaker with Swedish as a second language), found we could communicate simply, quite well. It just felt more natural and fluent. The way you literally say things translate quite well to English, so I can still think in English --if that makes any sense.