To be fair, a huge fraction already learn solid basic English as the local lingua franca due to differing dialects or international trade.

I don't know though, what features from Asian languages do you think are objectively simpler to learn than those in Esperanto? I don't know Esperanto, but I am pretty sure that not all Asian languages are particularly tonal. So I doubt that would come naturally to them either. Particles? Those are pretty fantastic, but does Esperanto already have them? Maybe a lack of gendered conjugations? Or just no conjugations at all and instead a separate word modifier or particle for different contexts?

Certainly the syllabary of Japanese is wonderful, I think it's better than English. Every consonant except 'n' has a vowel after, every vowel sounds the same regardless of context. Removing the distinction between 'r' and 'l' or 'm' and 'n' seems wise though. But maybe they already did that too?

There is no such thing as "objectively easy." Languages are easy or difficult in the degree to which they share common features and vocabulary with a language you already know. If you speak Spanish as a native language then English is much easier to learn than Japanese, but if you speak Korean as a native language the opposite is true.

You might well answer that, in that case, being truly neutral seems more or less impossible. Maybe so, and maybe you do need to just pick something. But then we get away from the idea of removing political dominance from the equation.

I disagree with your opening argument. Python is objectively easier to learn than c, no matter which one has learned first. In my own experience, I learned Esperanto at about 10X the rate at which I learned French (though this was also due to teacher quality). Esperanto has no irregular verbs, unambiguous pronunciations, and only a quarter of the usual vocabulary to learn because nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs all share identical roots. Being a native English speaker I did know similar roots more often, but no more so than I did for French.

The only place where I would agree Europeans have a significant advantage is that Esperanto has a European style letter script rather than an Asian character-based one. A fair point, and unfortunately no one has come up with something halfway between a letter and a character script. The best apolitical solution to that may be to make two alphabets for the next iteration of Esperanto.

OK, so you've proved that Esperanto is easier than a natural European language for you, a native speaker of English, to learn. Granted. But it's not a refutation of my argument that for someone who speaks, say, Japanese (also a language with almost no irregular verbs or ambiguous pronunciations, by the way), essentially none of the roots will be familiar and so it will still be much more difficult for them than for you.

The script is not really an issue; Chinese is the only major east Asian language (or language family) written exclusively in Chinese characters without a phonetic script, and even then the Roman alphabet is familiar.

Esperanto is certainly easier for someone who already knows a Romance language. However, even for a non-Romance speaker, it will be easier to learn than other Romance languages.

Sure, but what I am saying here is that if you don't speak a European language any Romance language, even Esperanto, is hard.

It's easy to not appreciate this, but in a way the hardest thing about learning a language is mastering the vocabulary. Think about your native language. When was he last time you encountered a grammatical structure you were unfamiliar with? Now when was the last time you encountered a word you were unfamiliar with?

If you're studying two related languages, like Spanish and English, you get a huge boost from the fact that the more difficult words are actually more likely to be the same. You don't have to study very hard to understand what "planeta" or "geografía" or "farmacia" mean. On the other hand, if you're studying Japanese, you have to memorize words like "wakusei," "chiri", and "yakkyoku" which have no resemblance whatever to the English words. And it just goes on and on and you are never really done encountering all the words you will ever encounter. Compared to this slog, mastering a grammar and the number of irregularities typical of a natural language is a minor annoyance.

>There is no such thing as "objectively easy." Languages are easy or difficult in the degree to which they share common features and vocabulary with a language you already know.

That's just wrong. All that means is that you haven't experienced all the crazy language features out there. Children all over the world learn their native languages at different speeds because some languages are harder than others.

I guess your statement is technically correct in that if you already know a really difficult language, learning it is easy, but that's just pedantry.

That's false, unless you want to bring writing into the picture. As far as the language itself (that is, the spoken one) goes it's completely wrong.

I'm going by the (admittedly, introductory) education I had in linguistics, so if you'd like to convince me otherwise I suppose I would need to see some sort of reliable source.

Why do you not think it is reasonable to assume a language with fewer requirements to utilize is easier for a human to learn in general?

If a language avoids relying on tonal information for word definition, for instance, it is very counterintuitive to say that a toddler learning would pick it up exactly as fast as a toddler that only needs to handle syllable identification.

Way more languages, including Asian ones like Japanese and Korean, do not have words which completely change definition based on pitch. I don't have any reason to think a Korean adult would find it any easier than me to detect tones in Mandarin.

I don't know how to search for a reliable source in the field of linguistics, sorry. The idea is really counterintuitive for me though. It's not like Chinese and Japanese are very similar, even if they're more likely to broadly share word roots. Assuming we aren't using pictograph writing anyway, they do share a lot of those.

But if you're going to argue that learning pictograph writing is exactly as easy as learning character writing, I'll direct you to how Japanese kids only can read 1000 characters by the time they're 12. With syllabic writing you can read anything way sooner. So clearly for written language some are easier than others too.

Well, Chinese is a very cool language but it's awful for keyboard input and the like. Ideally we'd use a language with an alphabet that also isn't tonal.

Surely an explicitly tonal alphabet is preferable to a language with implicit tone (e.g. English). I can only imagine that learning English's implicit tone curves pose a challenge to speakers of Asian languages.

(Esperanto is intended to be perfectly understandable without tonal inflection, through the use of particles such as "ĉu" and "ja", though in practice Westerners universally tonally inflect their speech because they don't know otherwise.)

What? Who has a tonal alphabet? Why would annotating tone in a non tonal language be helpful?

What's wrong with Chinese input using a decent IME actually?

I wish I could say that people are lazy and Chinese is fine if only one can employ the right tools for it, but the thing is, the Chinese writing, through its inherent nature, imposes a heavy cognitive load on its users. In this regard it is comparable to English, which does the same thing through its vocabulary. Many are criticizing the inflections in a given inflected language but that is actually a trick to lessen/optimize the language's vocabulary. The language and writing are communication infrastructure. The less we're paying for using those and the less they are getting in your way - the better.

It's much slower than a skilled alphabetical typist can do. In Japanese, and I assume also in Chinese, there is a faster system used by people who do jobs that require fast typing, but it's very complicated and most people do not learn it.

What is that Japanese system?

For Chinese there's the Wubi method [1], which assigns each radical component of a character to a key, by typing the right combination of keys for some of the components, individual strokes and disambiguation keys, any Chinese character can be almost uniquely identified (some typographic variants have identical representations).

I'm currently trying to learn it, because I hate scrolling through long lists of homophones to find some rarer character; but I have not yet achieved the level where I can just freely type out anything without looking up its key sequence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method

Sorry, it's been a while since I read about it and I'm having trouble finding the info again. I imagine it's similar to the stroke-based Chinese entry systems because each character would then have an unambiguous key sequence, obviating the need to keep checking the screen and selecting words from the menu.

e: Actually I found some info here: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E7%9B%B4%E6...

It looks like some systems are T-Code, TUT-code, etc.

This is wrong, but it certainly gets repeated a lot; Esperanto is still the easiest secondary language for Asian speakers to learn.

Easier than neighboring languages sharing thousands of words with common roots? I think I would need to see some sort of evidence to accept this claim.