Simpler is a culturally conditioned subjective value judgement rather than a scientific one and therefore it expresses an opinionated view. It may be more correct to say it is a more systematic script.
But "simpler" can be used in fairly objective ways. Spoon is a simpler mechanism than internal combustion engine. "Yes" is a simpler way of saying "absolutely I would be willing to undertake that endeavour". Square of plain colour is simpler than a painting. Some formula are simpler than others.
In this case the Immediate difference in sheer count makes it difficult for me to understand what point you're trying to make about this particular example, try as I might, because in this case I aftually think "more systematic" is the less defined, more ambiguous term :-(
Obviously, "native English-speaking" is assumed, so the time for a Mandarin speaker to learn Swahili or vice versa is not considered. This isn't really "complexity" in a universal sense.
It would be interesting to see a similar chart from the Chinese foreign service's language institute (I assume they must have one). Or the Egyptian one.
[1] https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/foreign-service-in...
What if we had the results of learning difficulty for native speakers of all the major languages, and some languages were hard for everyone? In principle, this is an experiment that's doable, if the foreign ministries of the other countries also publish this data.
Do you think people believe “tic tac toe is simpler than chess” because of cultural conditioning?
While there is a “floor” to the complexity of a script in its ability to faithfully reproduce a langage, there is no “ceiling”, you can always pile on complexity.
Although I would say that logographic scripts are the other kind of complexity, they’re complicated to learn and use because they’re simplistic in their approach.
Syllabic or alphabetic scripts require higher concepts, but that makes them more flexible and composable.
Hangul is simpler, that’s not really in dispute. It was literally designed to be simple so that a native speaker could become literate in ten days.
Hangul is not phonetic, it's a morphophonemic script. The Korean language has a lot of rules that applies at different boundaries, which make the pronunciation of words different from what is written. The best example of this is the "Korean wave" /han/ + /lyu/ => [hallyu], written has "hanlyu" (한류) which is conforming to the phonemic decomposition but certainly not to how the word is pronounced.