Esperanto

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Esperanto is the first (and so far only) language besides English in which I have become competent. It is much easier (or more accurately, less difficult) than national languages.

I have done various Esperanto translations.

1 Why Esperanto is nicer
2 Learning
3 Hostility toward Esperanto
4 Myths about Esperanto
5 Organizations

Why Esperanto is nicer

For me, the things that make it easier to learn and a pleasure to use include:

A simple consistent approach to building compound words out of roots, so that the core vocabulary you must memorize is smaller, and so that you can easily construct words for complex concepts on the fly.
A strong phonetic mapping between spelling and sound, unlike most languages (especially English). If you see a word written, you know how to say it.
Elegant simple grammar without lots of crazy rules and endings and exceptions.
No irregular nouns, verbs, etc to memorize. Even the verb "to be" is regular.
Relatively simple sounds (the 5 vowels found in many languages like Spanish; not a lot of subtle confusingly similar sounds like ś and sz in Polish), although there is a European bias so that, e.g., L vs R is a problem for some Asian speakers. Some English speakers have trouble saying the rolled R. Etc.
A mnemonic table of correlatives (those annoying words like "who, which, why", etc that are always a pain to memorize in most languages.

Learning

http://lernu.net is a great site to start learning Esperanto.
http://www.cursodeesperanto.com.br has a downloadable program for Windows and Linux

Hostility toward Esperanto

Since Esperanto has peacenik idealistic roots and is an "artificial" language, a lot of people have irrational hostility toward it. Claude Piron wrote some interesting essays exploring that:

Historically, Esperantists were persecuted under various dictators, e.g. Hitler and Stalin. It seems dictators don't like their citizens being able to communicate directly with people from other countries.

Myths about Esperanto

There are many ignorant myths and annoying misconceptions about Esperanto. To answer a few:

Yes, it is a "real language" by any sane criteria, unless you intentionally define "real language" in some narrow way to exclude Esperanto. Esperanto has a culture and history, it has speakers (including from-birth speakers), it has literature, slang, you can talk about any subject, it grows and evolves, etc. It simply works like any other language.
No one knows how many people speak Esperanto. I estimate roughly a million.
There are roughly 1000 people who know it from birth (usually because their parents met via Esperanto and use it as a primary language at home).
The language was officially released in 1887 by a Jewish Pole (Dr. Ludovico Zamenhof) and is spoken by at least a few people in practically every country now.
There is a lot of literature (original and translated) in Esperanto.
There is music (recorded and live bands) in Esperanto.
A handful of films exist in Esperanto.
The language grows and evolves and has its own culture and history.
There are "naughty words" in Esperanto.
It is perfectly possible to talk about emotions, write poetry, etc.
People can and do fall in love and talk about deep emotional stuff in Esperanto.
It is perfectly possible to use it as an everyday home language.
Yes, the core vocabulary is rather Eurocentric, but it is still far easier for non-Europeans to learn than English or other national languages.
No, there are not more Klingon or Elvish speakers than Esperantists. Sheesh.