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One thing that makes Esperanto popular in Asia is that the Asian languages are much more dissimilar than European languages. For example, the effort for a Japa
by narrator 9y ago
One thing that makes Esperanto popular in Asia is that the Asian languages are much more dissimilar than European languages. For example, the effort for a Japanese person to learn Korean is much more than to learn Esperanto.
- wodenokoto 9y agoThe Japanese -> Korean example is quite unfortunate as it is one of the big exceptions to the rule you put forth.
- nandemo 9y agoHow is it unfortunate? Korean might have some features that sound familiar to a Japanese speaker -- e.g. word order and morphology of Sinitic vocabulary -- but phonology is quite challenging and non-Sinitic vocabulary is completely different. Overall it's far, far harder than Esperanto for Japanese speakers.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jpatokal 9y agoJapanese and Korean are actually fairly similar as far as Asian languages go and may even be related, although that's controversial. Try eg. Japanese<->Chinese or Thai<->Malay for neighboring but completely unrelated languages.
- Figs 9y agoEh. I'm not sure if Japanese<->Chinese is that good of an example either; Chinese is sort of the Latin of Japanese. Even though it's grammar is different, China had a huge cultural influence on Japan, and both its writing system and its vocabulary (as spoken over a thousand years ago though!) were imported and incorporated into Japanese. Something like 60% of the Japanese dictionary is Chinese-derived either as old imported words, or more modern "wasei kango" (lit. Japanese-made Chinese words) -- think "television" for an English word equivalent (modern idea but coined with Greek and Latin word roots). There's a lot of really interesting details about this on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary