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by interlingua7 3091 days ago
Another interesting artificial language is interlingua. Interlingua is very easy to learn for many people in Europe since interlingua words are taken from English, French, Italian and Spanish. Interlingua is a pragmatic solution for a common language across Europe. As a native spanish speaker I was able to understand about a thousand words in one or two hours studying it. Esperanto is like Haskell, interlingua is like C, one is pure with universal rules for derivation, the other is for using the language from the first day for communication.
3 comments

Interlingua is the most intriguing conlang for me. It just seems incredibly practical. I'm a native English speaker with only high school french, yet I can pretty much read interlingua despite never having learned it. I imagine native romance language speakers are fluent readers right off the bat. That's huge.
Folksprak is another one like Interlingua, except based on the Germanic languages. One of the nice things about being an English speaker is you can pick up both pretty easily.

Another interesting one is Uròpi which tries to go back to the Indo-European roots of all European languages. It's not as immediately readable as Interlingua or Esperanto but not too bad either: http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html

I did extensive research on conlangs about a decade ago. My conclusions were that the conlangs worth actually trying to learn were

* Esperanto, because a significant number of people already speak it

* Ido, because it's a significantly improved version of Esperanto

* Novial, because it is significantly more rationally structured than Ido

* Interlingua, because it's a significantly more rationally structured version of languages around 700 million people already speak

Is there a non artificial language?
Perusing online Esperanto sites have yielded this gem:

Speak Esperanto Like a Native!™