You've also got the problem of difficulty and irregularity. And hurt sentiments Tongue Why Latin and not Sanskrit or Ancient Greek? If I had to choose, I'd probably choose Sanskrit, since I've heard incredibly things about the language. I don't know if it was propaganda (and given the things we Arabs often say about Arabic, it very well could've been), but it was really impressive.
Well, Sanskrit and Ancient Greek are probably more difficult to learn than Latin, having unfamiliar alphabets and weird diacritics, not to mention their complex systems of declension and mood. Of course, they're probably fascinating languages, but not really for beginners to learn. Latin at any rate, while not necessarily easy by any means, it's more familiar than the other two.
And I've heard some pretty wibbly-wobbly things about Hebrew, too. Some among the Jews call it
Lashon Hakodesh, literally,
The Holy Tongue. They esteem Hebrew just as the Muslims esteem Arabic. There are some curious things about it though. For instance the words for 'ear' (אזן) and 'balance' (מאזן) share the same root. The word for year (שנה) has the numerical value of 355, the number of days in the Hebrew lunisolar calender, as well as the word for 'week' (שבוע) having the same root as the word for 'seven' (שבע), and its numerical value being 378, a multiple of seven.
Oh, and here's a neat scene from the movie Pi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFmWhwyA0NUTo people who are learning it, it's quite difficult.
As is the case with learning any language, English, as far as I can tell, is just relatively easy and simpler than many others.
You have irregular pronunciation (oh, how irregular!), irregular orthography, irregular grammar, prepositions are a pain in the ass to learn to use correctly, and English is extremely idiomatic.
Well, loads of languages have irregular pronunciation, especially one as widely-spoken as English. I make no excuses for the orthography though, yes, it's not great. And I think the grammar isn't too hard, it's fairly straight-forward, based on word order rather than a load of complicated inflexions, and so on. Prepositions on the other hand can be a pain in the ass, even for me sometimes, phrasal verbs too. And metaphorical, idiomatic expressions are extremely common in all languages, I don't think you can fault English for that.
And nobody really takes the prescriptivists seriously anymore anyway.
They based their ideas on the grammatical forms of Latin, which obviously can't be applied to a language as different as English.
Anyway, while it takes a bit longer for a Chinese person to learn Esperanto, they will become very fluent in Esperanto eventually. This is often not the case with English. As Prof. Bruce Sherwood once said "Which is more just -- for the American to spend one year learning Esperanto and the Japanese to spend two years at it, or for the American to spend no time learning English while the Japanese spends ten years studying it -- and failing to learn it?"
I disagree. I think a person, if they really applied themselves to it, could learn pretty much any language in 10 years.
Verb tenses? That's the easy part
Well, I've heard otherwise. I guess different people find some parts more difficult than others.
Have you visited a non-predominantly English-speaking area and interacted with the locals?
Does the east end of Glasgow count?
If you want, you could read my posts on the main Esperanto thread where I discuss quite a few aspects of the language and the culture, all in one place, if you haven't already.
I'm quite content with my indifference on this particular subject, I'm afraid.
Topic: A question: Esperanto or Basque?