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>1. What is working is not Esperanto per se.

I've fully agreed with you on this point several times now so to try and make it clear. I fully agree with this point. Again.

>2. Even if you know English and Esperanto, Chinese will (even if it became somewhat easier for you as you might have claimed) still be a heck to learn (e.g. good ol' "counting words"), because they're so different that the even if the "solid foundation" helps it won't help much. That's why I'm bringing up Basque - I myself have trouble learning Basque even if this is the 4th language I have tried to learn.

Japanese isn't that far from the tree in terms of difficulty for an English speaker than Mandarin. Japanese shares the concept of counting words. Due to where Japanese Kanji come from (Chinese Hanzi), some even share the same meaning. 三回 means the same thing in Mandarin as it does Japanese as does the counter 首 for poems. Chinese has a more similar word order to English than Japanese does, a simple grammar, and one reading per Hanzi. Sheng1 (生) has 13 different ways it can be read in Japanese. I don't find the argument that, unlike Japanese, Chinese is so uniquely difficult that Esperanto wouldn't help like it did for me learning Japanese. But my ship has already sailed and I'll never be able to put that theory to the test because I've already been tainted with learning how to learn a language.

>As for the rational part, I don't know if you know programming but I'm gonna take programming as an example: imagine someone has only learnt C. Now, could claiming "learning Go will help you form a solid foundation about Haskell!" ever be considered rational? I really don't think it should.

Programming is a great example because there is a fundamental difference in people who understand programming and people who have learned a specific syntax for a given language. That difference is to learn a (programming) language and learning how to learn a (programming) language.

Do you think someone who knows C would learn Haskell faster than someone who has no prior programming experience? Likewise, would you recommend someone's first programming language to be Dyalog or an esoteric language like Brainfuck or would you recommend something more simple like Python or Java for them to grasp some fundamentals first?

Learning how to learn is the single most difficult step to learning anything. While learning to learn it is important to have a tool that isn't constantly getting in your way and making learning difficult.

That's not to say learning becomes effortless. Just because you speak three languages doesn't mean you'll immediately assimilate a fourth language instantaneously and without any effort. But I'd be willing to bet you're having a considerably easier time learning Basque as a fourth language than most people would as a second language.