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.
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?