Esperanto is the widely spoken artificial language in the world. We say “artificial” because it was invented in the late 19th century to become a universal second language, in order to encourage peace and international understanding. Because of that goal, Esperanto has a simple grammar, easy rules and a lot of words that resemble words from other languages. It was built to be simple and to be learned with minimum effort.

• Chinese is a “subject+verb+object” (SVO) sentence pattern language, and its grammar has no inflections of verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives.  Most words have only one meaning and you will be understood even if you mix up the phonetic order.  It sometimes has different meanings in different contexts, different word orders, and different tones.  Its tonal system is complex for most western language speakers who are not used to tonal speech.

• Malay (Indonesian) Spoken by around 300 million people, Malay also is an SVO language, and its plainness lies in the fact that there are no plurals, grammatical gender or verb conjugation. Instead of them, they use adverbs or tense indicators. For example, the phrase “I eat” is said saya makan. If you want to put the verb in the past, you simply add a word after the verb to indicate it: saya makan sudah (“I eat already”, that is, “I ate”).