Chinese, if you don't care about writing it, is simple grammatically (though a few concepts are hard to wrap your head around).
So, for your proposed equivalence, I think my original statement is true, and I also think the more general statement above is likely true in a wider sense.
Initial attempt maybe. But I think very soon most people will find out that if you are coming from an Indo-European background, Kazakh or Finnish, regardless of script used, is far more foreign than Russian or German.
Thats how it feels to me at least when I think about learning another language. It's a data point of one, but I don't think I'm that unique in this.
And once you do start, something like differences between analytic and synthetic languages probably would be more of a tripping point.
I would say that Americans (and people in general) are more likely to attempt taking up those languages, if given a fairly equal choice between them and others that also require learning a new alphabet. For the same reason (although on a lesser scale) that they might shy away from Chinese or Japanese.
It's one more hurdle.