To add to that, the level of ability you can achieve in 1 year learning English is also doable in Chinese. That's how long I had learned the language before I went for an exchange semester in Shanghai, and from leaving the airport onwards I spent a week speaking Chinese with everyone (taxi driver, checking in at the hotel, finding an apartment, registering my residence with the police ...). Things got funny when I didn't understand at first that my landlord wanted me to pay a deposit, but when someone wants your money, they can usually find a way to communicate, so in the end it worked out fine.

The difficulty of Chinese is more in the "long tail" of rare characters. If you memorize 5 characters a day (it gets easier once you know all the basic components), after a year you'll be able to read 90% of most texts and get by without much difficulty, but the remaining 10% require double or triple the amount of memorization and after that there'll still be rare characters that even native speakers don't recognize immediately.

Where does the writer, who claims to be a graduate student in Chinese studies, of the excerpt[0] below go wrong?

This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones. But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts. In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".

[0]: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Yup, this is a demonstration of Zipf's Law, which affects all human languages: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Moser has been discussed to death in the past, his article is pretty exaggerated to say the least.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that for most of history, Chinese referred to a writing system that was shared between many different languages, each with different pronunciations, coming from different places (what is now modern China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan), so the writing system was a script designed around semantic meaning, not sound. This also lets it get used in Kanji where words may have multiple readings (let's not even get into how crazy that is).

Now that mandarin is de-facto "Chinese", the writing system no longer serves its purpose, and in fact a lot of the character simplifications made in the 20th century make radical substitutions based on sound, further complicating things.

Seems like he's trying to make a point just for the sake of it. For a start yeah as a German I don't understand the example headline he's giving there even though I started learning English some 20 years ago. So what does that tell us? Apparently English is even harder than Chinese.. Or maybe that you'll eventually stumble upon an unknown word every now and then and can quickly look it up.

Reading a Chinese newspaper knowing 2000 characters is absolutely possible. You can either just rely on good old guessing from context since, you know, the headline is usually followed by an article, or you just look that word up. It's really not like you will stumble at ever other character since like that guy even admits 95% are already covered by the 2000 you know. Imagine reading the sports section for the first time. You might find a dozen characters or words you don't know, but after a week or two you'll eventually know enough Chinese terms regarding soccer. Same for any specific topic in any foreign language. As for the character combos, first of all while learning it's not like you memorize each character separately, you're usually given some examples of such combinations using characters you already learned, phrases to go along with it etc. For many combinations its even pretty easy to guess what they mean.

> born in a society speaking English or some closely related west European language

No, not really. Though Romance languages are related to English via PIE. So, it might have been easier than if my mother tongue was Finnish or Turkish or a non PIE Asian language.