[kaesar14]

It definitely does matter how difficult a language is to gain the status of a lingua franca. The written word of Chinese is beyond exceptionally difficult to learn. Saying English has such a bizzaro spelling system it might as well be pictograms just indicates to me you’ve never seriously given learning written Chinese a fair shake.

What does a learner of English need to be able to learn to write a word? 26 * 2 symbols, and a fair understanding of the most basic spelling rules to give any word a basic attempt at spelling. If you didn’t know the spelling of president, you could very reasonably guess your way through it (begins with a ‘p’, ‘z’s are pretty rare and I’d know if it had one, etc.) Contrast this with the modern state of China where actual teenagers have difficulties writing Chinese without the use of a computer because the written word is THAT vast.

I don’t see what your other examples have to do with anything…those are all languages that use an alphabet?