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Do you think it's possible to learn CoffeeScript without a JavaScript background?

It is possible, yes. I came from Ruby to CoffeeScript and 'learned' JavaScript for debugging purposes only. Since ES6, I do JS exclusively.

To start learning, yes, CoffeeScript throws syntax errors itself and redirect exceptions back to CoffeeScript with SourceMaps.

To master the language... not that good, skills in JavaScript is required for debugging and documentation purpose.

Interesting. I should take a closer look. Especially it might be cool to see what paradigms people develop when working with CoffeeScript exclusively. I first thought you might get into trouble with variable names and upper scopes, but I can imagine it would fit good with a functional approach. Any good resources, besides the official website?

The official docs is enough for learning. It's just JavaScript with sugar and you may refer to nodejs.org and MDN for API docs. I have to say that it's good for beginners but as ES2015 ES2016 evolves every year, there's more and more things we have to learn and CoffeeScript is not designed for that.

Just to chime in on this: I agree Coffeescript is a great thing in the Javascript world, and while you may not need to be an expert in Javascript to learn Coffeescript, it would be unwise to dive into Coffeescript without much knowledge of Javascript. Not to mention, its not a programming language in its entirety, its one that is compiled into another. Learning CS as a first language, and you'd be missing out on a lot of the things.

That'd be like trying to learn HAML without knowing HTML, at least for me. With all that said, once you get to the point of using Javascript and have your feet wet I would DEFINITELY learn Coffeescript.