Based on my 9 years in China learning the language I would have to disagree with your characterization. I've changed pronunciation and ways of saying things successfully. I just think it takes longer to get to that point than other languages.
Language difficulty is relative to your native tongue. Learning English is as hard for a native Chinese speaker as Chinese is for an English speaker. And learning Chinese for a Korean speaker is much easier than English.
Chinese is not exceptionally difficult. Over a billion people speak it.
I think the author of the post makes a compelling argument that what you say is not true. Just the convenience of dictionary lookup and quasi-phonetic spelling should make learning English far easier for a native Chinese speaker.
Pronunciation and grammar are much harder in English than Chinese though. Each language has many facets. The author is missing the forest for the trees.
Chinese grammar is ridiculously simple. There is no tense and no gender. Subject can be dropped from the sentence. Phonetically, pronunciation is always the same for a particular character. The language is like Legos, where you snap together a limited subset of sounds.
Memorizing characters is not the only aspect to the language.
An example is the Chinese word 海军 which an intermediate learner would recognize as “ocean army” and a beginner learner might recognize as something to to with water and maybe vehicles. Whereas in English the word Navy gives no indication to its meaning, only its prononciation.
Not really, memorising is nearly everything in language. If you don't even know the terms to communicate what can you do at all? What's easier? - Memorising English Grammar (even if you forgot an "s" somewhere everybody will still understand you) or memorising 3000+ characters? Sure, Chinese characters are beautiful (pretty much why I started learning Chinese) but they just aren't practical to communicate. Pinyin is just weird and became the main phonetic transcript probably (as many things in China) for political reasons rather than practical ones.
Language difficulty is relative to your native tongue. Learning English is as hard for a native Chinese speaker as Chinese is for an English speaker. And learning Chinese for a Korean speaker is much easier than English.
Chinese is not exceptionally difficult. Over a billion people speak it.