> Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inv

> Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. That's a very common misconception about Esperanto. It's true that most of Esperanto's etymology is of European origin, but cognate vocabulary isn't all, or even most, of what makes a language easy to learn. Just to pick one example: in most languages, you need to conjugate verbs according to their subject; in a lot of others, you need to decline nouns, too, according to their cases. And then there are the exceptions: there are hundreds of irregular verbs in English, and thousands in some other languages. Esperanto has none of these difficulties. Even if we were just to consider vocabulary, Esperanto vocabulary is so much easier to learn, because it's agglutinative: it's made up of composable, modular parts that can be recombined into other words. That means, if you know fifty words, you actually know five hundred. Just talk to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and they'll tell you that Esperanto was a hundred times easier to learn than English, other European languages, and other Asian languages, too.