> culturally aligning
> themselves with Turkey
Ability to distinguish between and produce Latin characters is an ability approximately everyone literate I've met in South East Asia has, too, and I suspect that's true of much of South and East Asia.
Definitely, though, the fact that the Latin alphabet eases the consumption of culture, science, commerce from a variety of Latin alphabet countries is a huge plus, but it helps to also understand the local context.
[1] http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/general-information/299/308 [2] http://www.turkkon.org/en-US/message-of-the-president-of-the... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union
I believe the Turkic languages are somewhat similar, so this move will immediately give Kazakhs a route into Turkish media and literature. This is probably a good thing given the decline of Russia and Russian.
Of course it is much more easy to read and understand the latin transcription of these languages.
And at least some of the English/Japanese difficulty is due to fact that you're also changing systems of writing, going from an alphabet to a pictographical system. Comparing that with English to Spanish is almost unfair because of the fact that so many English words of French and Latin origin have very similar cognates in Spanish. I'd imagine you'd have similar troubles if you tried to learn Hindi/Devanagari for instance. Devanagari is an abugida, so you'd need to learn all of the letters in the alphabet and a whole bunch of "modifications" to the consonants that denote adjoining vowels.
Sure, there will be some bumps in learning how to do things like spell and learning the rules, but it won't be that bad. Once the system is learned, it'd be more like writing difficult words by sounding them out.
As for cognates, well, you'd be surprised how much English is floating around in the Japanese lexicon these days.