I am a white American, lived in the US for 29 years and now have been in Taiwan for 3 months with my Taiwanese Fiance. I have been studying Chinese for about a year, with increasing fever since coming to Taiwan. From what I can gather so far, Chinese is much harder to get to a basic level than English.. Let's say a 1st grade level. This is primarily due to the tones, and the characters having no correlation to the words (this is the big one... thank god for flash cards).

My unqualified claim is that Chinese is "Hard to learn, (relatively) easy to Master" due to the reasons stated in the article... English would be "Easy to learn, hard to master", primarily due to the insane vocabulary and tricky grammar. How many chinese born speakers have you heard say "the, than, 's, that, which, at, " and the like, not to mention correctly pronounce all the various english sounds, not to mention American vs British english.

Anyways.. Point is. Chinese is hard. But so are other languages.

Of course, picking up another language that is similar to yours would be much easier. (English -> German), or (Mandarin Chinese -> Cantonese). It's all relative.

Something pretty curious about Chinese, though, is how difficult it is to understand if you don't know it. When being welcomed to a shop, they say 歡迎光臨 (Huānyíng guānglín) which I never noticed until I learned it, after which point I have heard it constantly. For comparison, in Tokyo, I vividly remember countless occurances of "irashaimase"