Some of these are good points, some are just silly.

(First, background: my wife is Chinese, I took a year of formal classes in college, and have subsequently learned by exposure. I can speak and understand a fair amount, enough to survive on my own in Beijing if need be, but I wouldn't consider myself fluent by any means. In particular, I can't read or write worth a damn.)

I think this article would be better if it were titled, "Why written Chinese is so damn hard." Spoken Chinese is actually pretty easy. To the extent that it is hard, it's hard only because it's different. It's hard for the same reason that Japanese or Arabic or Sanskrit are hard. The comparison with French is a bit off, because languages like French where an English speaker can take advantage of vast quantities of shared vocabulary and history are rare. Most languages are hard in this way. So that stuff is really just, "Why learning almost any language is so damn hard." And while that can be interesting, there's no reason to focus on Chinese there.

And in fact, spoken Chinese is relatively easy. The grammar is extremely simple. There are effectively no tenses, and there is no conjugation. Learning French, I spent weeks, possibly months, learning the proper ways to state that an event happened in the past. And while I do consider myself fluent in French, I'm far from perfect here. While I think I get it right most of the time, I really couldn't explain why one case demands the passé composé and another case demands the imparfait. Even knowing which to use, completely learning the conjugation rules for them took quite a bit of effort. By contrast, it takes about five seconds to learn how to say that something occurred in the past in Chinese, assuming you already know 1) how to say that it happened in the present and 2) how to state the time in question. You just stick the time in the right part of the sentence, and bam, it's now in the past. You go from "I eat" to "I yesterday eat". Couldn't be simpler. My Chinese vocabulary still stinks after years of exposure because there are almost no cognates to build on, but the grammar is one of the easiest around.

Written Chinese, on the other hand, is practically a different language. There is little link between the characters on the page and the sound you make to indicate the same words. It's common for people who speak completely mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects to still be able to communicate through writing. Chinese TV is almost universally subtitled for this reason. Lots of people can't understand what the people on TV say, but they can read the subtitles.

Written Chinese is hard. It's the vocabulary problem turned up to 11. It effectively doubles the work needed to learn a word. Worse if you're not good at the sort of visual learning and recognition needed to distinguish between thousands of characters. Unlike the spoken version, where it's only hard for reasons that any language is hard, written Chinese is just inherently hard. Native speakers take longer and require more study to become literate, too.

Because of this, I think you need to treat spoken and written Chinese completely differently when it comes to learning them and the question of the difficulty of learning them. And the fact that this article freely mixes the two is unfortunate because of that, especially since it gives the impression that spoken Chinese is hard to learn, and it really is not.

As a side note, technology is starting to really help out here. You can get apps that are able to do live character recognition using a smartphone's camera, and offer basic translations on the fly. I used one called Waygo during a recent visit to China and it was really helpful. Even if the translation sucks, it'll give you the pronunciation of the characters so you can look them up more easily, or ask somebody what they mean, or whatever.