Repeating my entusiastic posting from Imdb some time ago: We have a silent board! Hahaha!!!  
Ok, now how about everybody typing doen how he came to the silents?
I watched some of 'em "unknowngly" as a kid, mostly some keystone cops chasers shorts that came sometimes on TV. Loved the wacky pace and the funny music. Years later as my love for cinema was at full bloom, I saw some screenshots from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and decided that i had to see it. Luckily my local library had it on some crappy old Video in a butchered 46 min version, and I persuaded the stunned librarian to go to the attic, where some old films nobody wanted to see were bumming around (among them A fistfull of dollars, the third Man, and The Big Sleep!!!), and include it in the catalogue again, so i could borrow it. He did this (and I'm lucky to report all of the other films also got on display again), and when I put it in my VCR and saw the first scene I knew that I would love silents for the rest of my life. I admit that since then I've been a bit lazy watching silent films, as I usually watch them without soundtrack (I hate modern interpretations) and have to concentrate so much more to catch everything, that I've seen only about 150 of them.
Nevertheless I prefer silent films to the ones with sound (I'm not kidding!) and have still my whole life ahead of me to enjoy the many wonders from the past. 
So, what was your enlightenment regarding silent films?