I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1⁄10 the hours spent.
That’s not a fair comparison. If you know English + Spanish, you should expect Esperanto to be much easier than Japanese; but similarly, if you know English + Esperanto, you should expect Spanish to be much easier than Japanese. Esperanto is very much more like English or Spanish than it is like Japanese, and it will have been easier for you for that reason completely independent of whether it’s more learnable than other Latin-derived languages.
True—unfair and no reason to believe that learning the basics is all that well correlated to fluency. Still, a bit of evidence that it’s plausible that Esperanto is that much easier.
In any case, I ran across a bit of evidence just today that it won’t matter: Pilot Translation Kit claims it’ll ship in May.
That’s not a fair comparison. If you know English + Spanish, you should expect Esperanto to be much easier than Japanese; but similarly, if you know English + Esperanto, you should expect Spanish to be much easier than Japanese. Esperanto is very much more like English or Spanish than it is like Japanese, and it will have been easier for you for that reason completely independent of whether it’s more learnable than other Latin-derived languages.
True—unfair and no reason to believe that learning the basics is all that well correlated to fluency. Still, a bit of evidence that it’s plausible that Esperanto is that much easier.
In any case, I ran across a bit of evidence just today that it won’t matter: Pilot Translation Kit claims it’ll ship in May.