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[–] Aramande ago 

I honestly disagree that English is any better at being an intermediary language. I live in Sweden, and have lived in Sweden for all my life. We begin to learn English alongside Swedish from 1st grade.

One big problem that I see quite often, is people moving in from other countries with no knowledge of Swedish. Some of them want to learn, but end up having a very difficult time. Because as soon as a Swedish person hears that accent or realize you're missing vocabulary, he's very likely to switch over to English mode, just to make things easier. This means very little speech practice is available. It is still possible to learn Swedish, by (probably) years of self study.

No, I'd rather argue that Esperanto is a better language, because it makes everyone more equal. If you go to a country, and speak Esperanto with the locals, then sure, you will continue speaking Esperanto, but you'll have a very hard time with locals that don't know Esperanto or English (or any other language that you don't have in common). Esperanto can be used as a bridge between languages, because neither of you are local Esperantists, and if you're curious of how to say something in their language, you could just ask them about it. The only reason you'd have for not learning their language would be because you were not interested in their language.

I utterly love languages, whether they written for a computer program, or spoken with a friend on the other side of the world.