I don't know about the vocabolary. To me it seems to look most like spanish/italian and such, which I unfortunately don't know.

Quite a few of the words I do recognise though.

The pronounciation I think is much more important. Because it's very hard to learn new sounds when you are grown up.

I didn't know the z (actually I think it's in English as well, but somehow I have manged until recently without the buzzing).
Some of the s sounds (especially sx and jx) seems like one sound to me (and I guess that obviously I don't do at least one of them right).

Still I find Esperanto much easier to learn than English, German and Romanian (which are the only foreign languages besides esperanto I ever tried to learn).

I think my English is quite good now, - but nowhere perfect. And I have been living in US for 9 months and in Moldova 5½ month where I mostly used English (tried to learn Romanian, which together with Russian are the official languages in Moldova).

Actually even after highschool my English was really bad. But at university almost all my books was in English (I studied physics). So there I actually did learn, at least a lot of words.

I have been studying Esperanto since September (well I did the FEC course in 1995 and again in 2006 and I have tried a bit on my own hand, but really very little). And for sure it's better than my Romain (where I had a private teacher once to twich a week plus tried to practice my self for the 5½ month I was there plus a bit (to little?) of preparation before I got there).

Esperanto is the first foreign language I have felt somewhat succesfull with.

Just recently I was actually able to stay with a guy who spoke Esperanto and communicate fairly o.k. with him for the two days stay (comparable to Passporta Servo).
Don't get me wrong. There was some gestures and guesswork included in the communication! But also some Esperanto
He's Italian and I am Danish. He spoke very little English and I speaks no Italian.
A true success story for the real life

Would Esperanto have been tougher to learn if I was Russian, Chinese, Korean or similar?
I don't know. But at least to me the words are the smallest problem. The spelling, grammar and especially the pronounciation is a lot harder.
And though I can't make all the sounds of Esperanto I still find all of these 3 points much easier than what I have otherwise tried.

But of course, I am also european. I don't know how it would be for asians.

I think the point about Esperanto pronunciation is quite fair. It's unnecessarily difficult. A CvCv structure would indeed have been much better.

I think this is just part of the fact that Esperanto is not the best possible auxiliary language. That doesn't mean it's not worth learning or preserving, but if esperanto ever were adopted as an international auxiliary language, I would imagine that certain changes would be made to simplify it further. The pronunciation would be one of them. But, then, if the pronunciation were simplied, then a lot of the words would have to be changed.

I still think that Esperanto's best point is the affix-based grammar. The vocab and pronunciation could be completely changed, and you'd still have a good language.

There is an aspect of this that isn't being mentioned.

Volapük, a predecessor of Esperanto, took care to be easily pronounceable by people from all different countries. It took care to mostly (though not always) keep a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel word order. It even, in its original form, did not include the letter R, since it was perceived that it would be hard for Asians to pronounce the difference between L and R. Although, the creator of Volapük included the letters ä, ö, and ü, which I would hardly call international. The point is, ease of pronunciation was taken into account.

What was the result?

We have heard of how Asians have problems learning Esperanto words because they lack cognates in Asian languages.

Volapuk based most of its words on English.

In any case, Volapük made learning the language equal for everyone - equally hard that is, as the words were equally unrecognizable to everyone. Rose became "Lol". Because R became L! I am not sure how the S think came to be, perhaps "Los" already had a meaning. Flen means "friend", though I wouldn't guess this. Flent means "France", which I would also not guess. Volapük is a word derived from English - vol (from world) and pük (from speak). I would never guess, seeing the words vol and pük, that they are derived from English, and even if I did know, I wouldn't guess their meaning.

I think Zamenhof saw this feature of Volapük and decided that it was better to have some people recognize some words, than to go for total universality and total equality, and make it so that no one recognized anything. Sure, you can pronounce it easily (except for the pesky ä, ö, and ü). But who can learn it in the first place? Not so many people, as it turned out. Most Volapük speakers "defected" and most Volapük clubs became Esperanto clubs, once Esperanto came out.

I agree, and IIRC from my reading, Zamenhof deliberately chose source languages that were widely studied at the time, and those languages still are the widely studied ones.

I don't think an IAL needs to be equally fair/unfair to everyone in every respect, however it must be said that learning Esperanto vocabulary is much more difficult for people who don't speak English or a Romance language. And for people who recognize very few of the roots and have problems with the pronunciation, it's questionable whether Esperanto is easy enough to learn to justify putting in the effort.

At any rate, Esperanto is in no danger of being chosen as an IAL, so it's a bit of a moot point It is what it is, and that's fine. For me, the important point about Esperanto is that it shows that it's possible to rationally construct a language which is practical, functional and reasonably easily learnable. Whatever flaws and shortcomings it may have, it serves as an example of what's possible.

erinja:Volapük, a predecessor of Esperanto, took care to be easily pronounceable by people from all different countries. It took care to mostly (though not always) keep a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel word order. It even, in its original form, did not include the letter R, since it was perceived that it would be hard for Asians to pronounce the difference between L and R. Although, the creator of Volapük included the letters ä, ö, and ü, which I would hardly call international. The point is, ease of pronunciation was taken into account.

I think what the biggest problem with both Volapük and Esperanto is that neither of them had much of an investigation take place when considering 'what would be easy to pronounce'. But it's a bit hard to blame the creators considering the world was much 'smaller' back then and for them the biggest experience with language would have to be European languages (well, at least I doubt they'd having conversations with Koreans over Skype back then).

I think Volapük also had an additional problem in that while the creator may have considered making pronunciation easier, he did considerably distort the words beyond belief, past the point of making it easy to speak out. Thank God Zamenhof didn't go with that logic .

Ease of pronunciation and recognition of words are properties that pull a language in opposite directions.

I personally would gladly sacrifice some ease of pronunciation for some ability to recognize some words, and I think Zamenhof thought the same way. You can definitely see it when you study the evolution of Esperanto; frequently he went from a less recognizable form to a more recognizable form. It's also visible in his choice of orthography. According to the spelling rules of very early, pre-release Esperanto, the word "ĵurnalo" would have been written źurnalo. Same pronunciation, but one is much more recognizable than the other (to those of us who aren't Eastern Europeans!)

And the unfortunate legacy of colonialism, though fortunate for Esperanto, is that European languages are learned all over the world. So although speakers of non-European languages are not likely to recognize nearly as many Esperanto words as speakers of European languages, they are likely to recognize at least a few.

erinja:Ease of pronunciation and recognition of words are properties that pull a language in opposite directions.

Being the persistent person I am I still disagree a bit. Simply adding a couple of 'supporting' vowels between consonants doesn't distort pronunciation much, nor do many other ease-of-pronunciation conventions. Nonetheless I might be making this out to be a bigger issue than I feel it is, and I apologise for that

And also to me 'źurnalo' and 'ĵurnalo' are just as recognisable as 'newspaper/journal', especially since they would be pronounced the same. Learning the alphabet's easy anyway IMHO. That's probably a very biased opinion given that the first language I tried to teach myself was Russian so I'm fairly used to the zh's etc in transliteration.

And the unfortunate legacy of colonialism, though fortunate for Esperanto, is that European languages are learned all over the world.

Just out of curiousity, is 'scii' actually from a European language or an original root?

ceigered:Just out of curiousity, is 'scii' actually from a European language or an original root?

It's from the Latin "scire", meaning "to know" or "to understand".

It is the root that led to the word "science" in English.