How does Esperanto work for speakers of non-Western languages?

Question

I need to be careful with this question, to avoid it becoming too opinion-based:

Given that Eo has origins in Indo-European languages, with both grammatical constructs and vocabulary, it seems to me that it's easy to learn for people with a Western background. With basic competency in German, English, French, and Latin, I can guess the meaning of many words I have not encountered before. And the grammatical structure is also familiar.

How does this work for people with a non-Western background? Do native speakers of Chinese or Korean (or any other non-Western language) find it harder to learn Esperanto? Is the grammatical structure/morphology a problem?

I would be interested what aspects of Eo are hard/easy for such speakers.

Answer 1

Talking of Japanese, this is what it has in common with Esperanto:

• The basic number system is fairly similar
  十二 (dekdu)
  二十 (dudek)

• Some demonstrative pronouns have a similar logic
  ここ (ĉi tie)
  そこ (tie)
  どこ (kie)
  こんな (ĉi tia)
  そんな (tia)
  どんな (kia)

• Esperanto has prefixes and suffixes that correspond to the Japanese ones

Japanese people could have "problems" with the fact root words are taken from Latin or European languages, but deriving words from root works (or understand them) is easier for them. For me, for example, it was not easy to understand the logic behind a word like malsanulejo.
They also need to adapt to the word order, which is SOV in Japanese and (generally) SVO in Esperanto, although an Esperanto sentence is still understandable even when written as SOV (e.g. Mi vin amas).