Esperanto is super Euro-centric, though, which can alienate people from Asia and other places. Esperanto did have something of a brief boom here in Japan, but the barrier to entry is also high since it shares no vocabulary (outside of some loans into Japanese and Korean, though some of those don't retain the same meaning, and basically very few in Chinese from what I understand), has different grammatical structure, etc. Chinese is basically SOV like many European languages, from what I gather, but Japanese and Korean are generally SVO.

There's also a whole high-context vs. low-context language issue.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 1 points 35 minutes ago

English very little overlap with Japanese either. It's just popular because the US had a huge influence on the country after dropping two nukes on it. English is still "cool" there, so of course people insert it all over, but that doesn't mean the languages have a lot of overlap.

[–] Szewek@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

"Countering a common criticism against Esperanto, the statistician Svend Nielsen has found no significant correlation between the number of Esperanto speakers and the similarity of a given national native language to Esperanto."

Wikipedia describing the results of this paper: https://svendvnielsen.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/explaining-the-density-of-esperanto-speakers-with-language-and-politics/