Given that international auxiliary languages allow for more efficient cooperation; I think more people should consider using an easily learnable IAL, like Esperanto.
IALs would reduce the English dominance that gate-keeps software development to English persons; and hence allow more potential software developers to better develop software. The English language is mostly dominant in software development because of linguistic imperialism.
I’m referring to 16 years of experience teaching language and seeing where the pain points were in acquiring English from Mandarin speakers. The irregularity of English grammar was never a particularly difficult point. The Chinese just sat and memorized, something they’re good at from just their own orthography, given that it’s almost, but not quite, entirely devoid of system.
What were pain points were conceptual pain points. Most people couldn’t grasp articles and when they should or should not be used. (Esperanto has an article whose use case is bizarre.) Most people had a hazy grasp on verb conjugation, freely using whichever conjugation first passed their lips without subject/verb agreement. Declining for number was a pain point. Even the mildest amount of gendered language caused problems (“he” and “she” tend to get used interchangeably and fluidly, often switching between them in the same sentence). Verb tenses. Verb aspects. Both of these caused tremendous difficulty.
And Esperanto has all of them and more.
Would Esperanto be easier than English to learn? Of course! It’s far more regular than English. But the point here is that while easier than English, it’s not much easier than English because as a language at a conceptual level it is not that different from English. And then on top of that the consonant clusters (thank you Polish!) would render it nigh-impossible to pronounce. We’re talking about people for whom the word “lonely” is a tongue-twister because of the switch between ‘l’ and ‘n’. For whom the “str” in “string” is a pain point. And I’ve spotted Esperanto words with five-consonant clusters, four of them hard.
There is not much difference in terms of difficulty between learning English for Mandarin speakers and learning Esperanto because the difficulties come from conceptual levels, not practical. There are alien ideas in Esperanto (shared with English), and that’s where the hard part comes. So the choice of a Chinese speaker is to learn Esperanto and get (generously) a million people (of eight billion) to speak with, or get (equally generously) 1.5 billion people (of, remember, eight billion) to speak with.
When that stark calculus is presented, the choice is clear: spend the little bit of extra work it takes to learn English and ignore Esperanto.
I’d be very interested in seeing your mentioned studies, incidentally. Specifically seeing who performed them (and what their methodology was). My guess is that they weren’t professional linguists, and nor were they particularly rigorous (using things like self-selected subjects, etc.).
Do you also study linguistics or just teach? Also, have you studied Esperanto?
So anecdotal evidence. I’d like to see if any other linguistics teacher has the same or different opinions.
Also, your evidence is from Mandarin speakers; what about European speakers, or African speakers? Your assumption should apply to Mandarin speakers then; because otherwise you just assumed that Esperanto wouldn’t be more difficult than English for other unspoken groups (like the Vietnamese and African)
It’s kinda important to get anecdotal evidence with other groups so that you don’t make a hasty generalization.
Concepts aren’t the only factor that influence difficulty. Conceptually, glass is easy to make when learnt; but it is hard in practice to initially make glass, because the human body lacks experience. Likewise, English might seem easy to conceptually learn; but the English orthography can make English hard to speak, especially when there are letters that can have the exact same sounds as another letter (like C and K).
How so? What’s wrong with consonant clusters? English has them (such as c).
Or: Learn Esperanto anyway to make communicating easier for the rest of the world that doesn’t speak English. (6.5 billion) There’s barely even a cost to learning Esperanto.
and do you have any studies supposedly showing the negligent difficulty of English and Esperanto?