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Esperanto: Learning Esperanto
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Actually, Esperanto's grammar is not Euro-centric and its simplicity and logic will be appreciated by everybody. Only the vocabulary is Euro-centric. And this is not a disadvantage but an advantage for everybody, because the majority of the world's population knows a European language: not just people in North and South America and Australia but ... people in Africa typically speak at least one European language. In Asia there are not quite as many people as elsewhere, but learning European languages is still incredibly popular there. Also, Esperanto's vocabulary is so versatile that very few word stems actually have to be learned. For example, it's a common estimate that knowing 500 word roots are enough to express basically anything in Esperanto and most of the rest are just synonyms of words that could be created from those roots.
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Esperanto has proven to be a good deal easier for speakers of European languages to learn as a second language than any national language (especially highly irregular and/or non-phonetic languages such as English, French, and Chinese). There is ... evidence that studying Esperanto before studying any other second language (especially an Indo-European language) speeds and improves learning, because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple auxiliary language lessens the "first foreign language" learning hurdle. In one study (Williams 1965), a group of high school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a better command of French than the control group, who studied French without Esperanto during all four years.
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Esperanto has a very regular structure. Words are often made from many other roots, and in this way the number of words which one must memorise is made much smaller. The language is phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are very simple, so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written worde and vice-versa. All this make the learning of the language relatively easy.
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A knowledge of Esperanto makes it much easier to learn other foreign languages, and there is some evidence that it is actually more efficient to learn Esperanto first, before learning other languages, rather than to study foreign languages directly. For example, one may become more fluent in French by first studying Esperanto for 6 months and then studying French for a year and a half, rather than studying French for two continuous years. The reason may be that Esperanto's regular grammar and word formation and flexible syntax makes it easier to understand other languages' grammar and rules.
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People who speak Esperanto are often called Esperantists. No one knows exactly how many people now speak Esperanto. The most common guesses are between several hundred thousand and 2 million speakers around the world. It is estimated that 1000 people know Esperanto from birth (because they learned it from their parents, in addition to learning a national language like English or Polish.)
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The basic rules and words of Esperanto were proposed by L. L. Zamenhof at the end of the 19th century. Within a few years, people started learning it and formed a worldwide community. Since then, Esperanto has been in use (and freely evolving) just like any other language.
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Learning Esperanto