I think English spelling is a pain but overall I think 中文 is worse. There are an awful lot of characters to know for one thing. My understanding is that you have to work pretty hard to be literate in 中文. Also I understand that the horizon where 中文 gets hard to read is closer in time than it is English, that is even 150 year old texts are difficult to read and reading Confucius is harder than reading Chaucer. Contrast the problem of memorizing irregular spellings to the problem of remembering how to draw thousands of characters.
which is kind of a cleaned-up Latin. As a native English speaker who knows a lot of Latin roots from science and literature and who also has gotten good doses of Spanish and French, I can read the sample texts in that Wikipedia page right off that bat.
It is a strange thing though that you can go through the first few chapters of a book on 中文 grammar and get the feeling there is something refreshingly regular about that language, almost as if it was an artificial language. When you get towards the end you find there are many things that will strain this sense of quick familiarity and I am told if you actually try to use the language it's harder than you think.
The curse of Chinese characters is that they unite the country. You can't get rid of them because Chinese then becomes 10 languages, and they're suddenly broken up like Europe. If everything were Mandarin, you could Romanize or Bopomofize no problem (although with much grumbling of course.) But it's not, and probably not going to be as far as I know; it's like Hindi. It's the writing that makes China one country.
For a non-native speaker, sure, that's not obvious. For a native, especially if they're well read and have a decent vocabulary or have studied any Latin it's just fine. The many styles of englishizations of foreign words (romanization just doesn't quite fit here) and obsolete-in-terms-of-pronunciation spellings provide valuable context for pronunciation and meaning to people who have sufficient familiarity.
