How many people speak Esperanto ?

Just love this comment. This is also what I face when I am in my promotion of Esperanto. People tend to know how many people speak Esperanto, the time spend to learn is not a matter of fact, it is the usefulness.

Speaking two languages or more in my country, Malaysia is very common. Though some of the languages may not be proficiency, it has the purpose of communication.

As my friends said, they never heard Esperanto in Europe on the street eventhough Esperanto was borne in Europe.

Care to consider this matter more instead of keep talking how good the language is if the Esperantists or Esperanto speakers are not even using some at home with the family members.

Whether or not one can speak a language fluently after only a short period of instruction is not a good test of “workability”. The best test is always to see how many people currently speak a given language and, on that basis, Esperanto falls short. Perhaps after a sustained and coordinated campaign of state-sponsored education this might change (as happened to promote the “French language” in 19th Century France) but this would not be politically possible (nor, arguably, even desirable).
It’s true that having English as the “common language” of Europe might not be politically neutral – but does English as a language really belong to the English as a nation? Just as Latin survived the fall of the Roman Empire, English has survived the fall of the British Empire and lives on as common property.

http://www.debatingeurope.eu/2011/08/03/should-esperanto-be-the-language-of-europe/