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added paragraph on 'hard'
Oliver Mason
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This article (I have only got access to the abstract) seems to state that it's still easy to learn easily for non-Western speakers: https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/lplp.32.1.05lin/details

I also do not know any Asian speakers of Eo; but then, living in the UK I do not know many Asians altogether. So it might well be a case of the 'bubble' you live in. Previously I had come across the notion that Chinese people especially liked Eo as it was free of any colonial associations which came with the other European languages.

It still seems to be taken more seriously in China than in most Western countries:

1910s: Esperanto is taught in state schools in the Republic of China, Samos, and Macedonia. (Today it is part of the curriculum of China, Hungary, and Bulgaria.) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Esperanto

Then there is also the question of what it means for a language to be hard. This is generally related to how different a foreign language is to your native one. My native language is German, so I have little difficulty learning English, Dutch, and even Swedish. But Korean, Japanese, and Chinese would be harder for me to learn, as they are very different in phonology, morphology, syntax, etc.

However, by that reasoning Eo should not be any harder to learn for non-Western speakers than any other Western language. On the contrary, due to its regularity it would be easier. Perhaps not as easy as for a native Western language speaker, but still easier for a non-Western language learner than learning English, French, or German.

Oliver Mason
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