What jchthys said.

jchthys:I think that there’s hardly a comparison between English and Esperanto. The latter is not perfect, but it can still be used effectively by an Asian in much less the time needed to learn English.

Indeed, and as I've pointed, Esperanto is much better than English.

jchthys:Ideologists might insist on a perfectly neutral language (like Solresol or Lojban), but the way I see it, it’s a lot harder for Westerners to learn those languages—as well as harder for non–IE language speakers. And Chinese learners of Esperanto won’t be able to use their vocabulary learnt from the IAL in learning English or another Western language.

Why not picking words from all the major languages of the word, like Mandarin and Arabian? After all, picking roots only from European languages makes Esperanto harder to learn to 5 billion people and Western learners of Esperanto won't be able to use their vocabulary learnt from it in learning Japanese or another Asian language. Maybe we, from the West, feel so much superior to the rest of the world that we expect them to learn our languages, rather than ourselves learning theirs...

jchthys:The main advantage in Esperanto is its flexibility and lack of restrictions regarding idioms (...)

That's true. But any constructed language would have this feature, not only Eo.

jchthys:Having a neutral language at the expense of just changing the vocabulary to equally unfamiliar roots (see my proposition, which is purely for fun) does not make it any easier for the other nations. It only has a detrimental effect on the Westerners.

What if Esperanto was fully based on Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Bengali and Arabic with no major contribution of European languages? If that was so, it would be familiar to more than 2 billion people (Take a look). As it is, Esperanto is familiar to no more than 1.5 billion. Why is this 1.5 billion more special? Don't Americans and Europeans have advantages enough already?

Continuing:

I think Esperanto is a very, very nice language, I enjoy it a lot, but in my opinion it's not a true global, fair and neutral language. Such a language should have vocabulary and features from all major languages of the world, it should be designed to be as easy as possible for everybody, not only for us. Unfortunately I don't know any language that pleases me completely, but in my personal opinion, Esperanto is too far away from the ideal, it's a nice IAL for the West, but not for the world. Just take a look at lernu!'s map, Europe is black-full of Esperantists, China probably is beaten by Brazil in member-count, India, Indonesia and ME are empty... I guess they have less people connected to internet, but I don't think that' the only reason.

In short, though, I feel Esperanto has enough advantages as a world language over English to counterbalance the speaker-count. No constructed language that overcomes the Eurocentrism of Esperanto is either (1) viable in terms of speaker base or (2) easy enough for all parties involved. Lojban is neutral in being equally difficult for anyone—I prefer a nonneutral language that’s easier for everyone.

Vilinilo - don't underestimate the numbers of people connected to the internet in Indonesia and India

Maybe the Kurso de Esperantisto made by the Brazilians is a reason for Brazil's massive amount of speakers? I wouldn't know though, being a bit too far south-west to count as a brazilian

And Vilinilo, I agree with your idea. One idea I had was to take easy, well known international vocabulary from English and use that as a basis for a conlang.
E.g. 'eco' = environment, all those kinda words etc.
The reasoning is that English has a lot of words in it's colloquial dictionary as per result of our different sub-cultures. Muzo's (musicians) would have many words from italian in their mental lexicons, anime and manga fans such as myself have many asian words in our heads (particularily Japanese which borrows just about half the Chinese language), and EO'ists have our little words melded into our languages also/ankaux .

If you have enough of a pan-cultural investigation you could almost find an international lexicon on the internet, and then all you need is some insanely easy grammar.

la dai man est' sur la skyscraper ...
Ok maybe a few more modifications may be necessaire...

And jchthys, I think the reason that conlangs that don't overcome Eurocentrism are poorly regarded is because Europe is still very much the 'powerhouse' of the world (not technically true, but not entirely wrong either).

Mmmm. Maybe we should all put what features we want in a IAL conlang and try and make a a-priori template langauge (I say template because half the work with these things is making a viable lexicon, if you make one up from scratch you can get grammar done much quicker).
One problem would be - what sounds should the language have? Japanese's 22 is a good number - too low and you're restricting the size of the dictionary and comprehension (too many words would otherwise sound alike), and too high and you're expecting people to too much new things.
Another problem would be grammar. Agglutinative/post-positional or prepositional? How do we handle pseudo-nouncases? Natural plurality or natural singularity? Definite quantities or ambiguous?

Could be an interesa projekto.

I'd support any IAL that was designed by ceigered

I think you're right about the Kurso de Esperanto, I, myself, started studying Esperanto by the Kurso. It's an excellent didactic material and it's available in many languages other than Portuguese.

I think one of the main reasons why Esperanto is relatively popular in Brazil is the support and divulgation by a popular religion from here, the "Spiritism". I followed that religion as a child and it was in its church that I've listened about it for the first time.

Anyway, I'd expect that populous countries, such as India and Indonesia would have as much speakers than Brazil, and maybe more. What's the problem, is Esperanto not reaching them or are they not reaching lernu! ?

Vilinilo:I'd support any IAL that was designed by ceigered
/......./
Anyway, I'd expect that populous countries, such as India and Indonesia would have as much speakers than Brazil, and maybe more. What's the problem, is Esperanto not reaching them or are they not reaching lernu! ?

1. Dankon , but I highly doubt I'm at a Zam, Schleyer or Kisa level yet. I thought about using EO as a base to save time, but I like EO as is even if I find it not 100% perfect
2. It could also be that English is more popular - which could be the case in those countries if people believe it can improve their lives. I reckon that one part of the EO community that needs to grow within time is the business infrastructure - last time I checked, local EO societies were the main businesses.

ceigered:Dankon , but I highly doubt I'm at a Zam, Schleyer or Kisa level yet. I thought about using EO as a base to save time, but I like EO as is even if I find it not 100% perfect

Yeah, Esperanto’s good enough to make Esperantidoj rather useless… If another IAL is to be made it would have to be fundamentally different from Esperanto in terms of grammar and neutrality to be viable.

ceigered:It could also be that English is more popular - which could be the case in those countries if people believe it can improve their lives. I reckon that one part of the EO community that needs to grow within time is the business infrastructure - last time I checked, local EO societies were the main businesses.

I think that the level of neutrality of Esperanto is not what’s holding it back—I think it’s the lack of knowledge about and interest in learning the language. Another IAL wouldn’t (or hasn’t) helped the situation. I don’t mind the idea of more IALs per se, but they could really hinder the IAL movement as a whole. I suggest we wait until maybe 25% of the world speaks Esperanto before proposing any more alternatives

By the way, the current president of UEA is Probal Dasgupta, who was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India.

ceigered:
And whatever is perceived as better is generally relative and personal or influenced by public perception.
There was however neo-patwa and another language by some guy call Arpee on YouTube and unilang, both of which were better than Esperanto in many ways, however for me the critical weaknesses were that they were too tokiponaish and that they lacked incentive to be learned.

Thanks for the mention. I'm the developer of Neo Patwa so thought I'd just jump in. I think the purpose of NP is a bit different from Esperanto. I was really trying to create something that can be used for minimal communication, like a pidgin or trade jargon. I think that it might eventually expand but it's not planned to be a language that can be just like any natural language.

ceigered:
Anyway apparently one of the easiest languages to learn as a child is Turkish, would would show advantages in the agglunative system vs the mixed system that eu languages and eo have.

I've heard of that too, but I'm somewhat suspicious of that study. The person made it seem like Turkish children master their language at the age of three, but in fact if you look at the school curriculum in Turkey, they have classes in Turkish language going all the way to high school. I think the test may have been saying that they made fewer grammatical errors at that stage, which is fine but not really a measure of how well a person can communicate. In fact, I think that the main difficulty for young children is not the grammar but really a lack of vocabulary and (even more importantly) a lack of cultural knowledge. Children can't discuss economics because they have no idea how companies are operated and things like that. Writing is a completely different matter, of course.

ceigered:
If you have enough of a pan-cultural investigation you could almost find an international lexicon on the internet, and then all you need is some insanely easy grammar.

la dai man est' sur la skyscraper ...
Ok maybe a few more modifications may be necessaire...

I think that's actually a great idea. Trying to find those kinds of pan-cultural words would lead to something that many people would find easy. One addition to make, that you might or might not agree with, is that there are some terms that are known fairly internationally though people don't necessarily know the meaning. For example, the "hima" in "himalaya" means "snow," and although I didn't know it, once I learned it I've never forgotten it. (It's the word used in Neo Patwa). I think that leveraging those kinds of well-known terms could also contribute to your idea.