There are so many comments here that, at least for me, are even more interesting than the article itself. It was especially interesting for me to compare my experiences with the comments of others here. For example when I was at the A1/A2 level of learning Chinese I felt that Chinese is actually quite simple. Much simpler in fact than my mother tounge German. But now that I am trying to get from about B1 to B2 I feel like standing in front of a huge wall of grammar and never-seen-vocabs that I seem to need to know to produce meaning from reading a chinese article. Luckily technology helps a lot already and writing/speaking is not as hard as reading, but still it can be frustrating at times when you feel your skill improved a lot but still you are not able to read a simple blog article better than months ago.