My perspective may be skewed as a Westerner, but it seems to me that the Chinese writing system is too difficult for it to be effective as a lingua franca. To b

My perspective may be skewed as a Westerner, but it seems to me that the Chinese writing system is too difficult for it to be effective as a lingua franca. To be fair (and as the article points out) English has a lot of non-phonetic spellings, but you still only need to know 26 characters have some idea of how a word is pronounced. But you are right, if we were choosing a language based solely on its objective qualities, we would probably have to choose Spanish or something like Esperanto.