I've lived in China and studied Chinese for 13 years, much of that reading heavily (I'm a literary translator), and I'm only now, in year 13, developing the ability to scan Chinese text successfully. I'm not posing this as some objective argument about the learnability of Chinese, just that, in the case of my brain, at least, my eyes are far more able to inhale an alphabetic script than Chinese characters.

My increasing ability to scan lines hasn't slowed my increasing disability to write with a pen! Despite my occasional flirtation with wubi.