There's so much wrong with this article. For starters, no one speaks Classical Chinese/Wenyanwen. Not now, not ever. It was designed for writing only, and the conciseness was to preserve bamboo (but stayed because it conveyed a sense of authority). Most importantly, modern Chinese remains challenging after all of the "westernization" events used as examples in the article, and the difficulty is not just because you get a new set of characters. On top of the writing system, you need to learn the tones, new phonemes like x, zh, q, and an entirely new vocabulary that shares very little cognates with English. And the grammar is different, with Chinese relying on much less conduction and requires much more context to understand.