[yorwba]

> pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul)

That's an interesting combination.

The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics. Writing it in Hangul instead would make it just another language with a writing system few people are familiar with.

Whereas Hangul as used for writing Korean has plenty of cases where the same symbol represents different sounds in different context and vice versa different symbols representing the same sound in the same context. There's an internal logic to it that makes sense for Korean, because it results in words deriving from the same root being spelled similarly, but if you apply it to Malay, it's just another random set of symbols that can be assigned sounds by convention.

[newsbinator]

> The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics

Malay/Indonesian is ridiculously easy and fun to learn. The simple/logical grammar is a joy compared to English, French, Arabic, etc. And it doesn't really have tones like Chinese.

Anyway Malay + Hangul may not be your first choice, that's totally fine. Whatever is your first choice, let's go with it and establish it as the global baseline language that all children learn in school from kindergarten and in cartoons long before that.