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 Generally in China a native child can fluently speak Chinese before they go to school. However, most of them speak some Chinese dialect at home and their level in official Chinese (Mandarin) is less than average.
In the first month of school they will learn Chinese phonetic symbols, pinyin (very important in pronunciation) and then Chinese characters in some simple short text, whith emphasis in readings and writings. At the end of the second year they will have learned almost all common Chinese characters and words allowing them to read newspapers and books (except for specific vocabularies like computer science or ancient literature).
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When we talk about Chinese or Chinese language, we usually mean the Chinese official language – mandarin Chinese (speaking) and simplified Chinese (writing).
Every Chinese learns to speak mandarin and learn to read and write simplified Chinese in their elementary school. However for some historical reasons Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao use traditional Chinese, which is a more complicated writing system. There are also many Chinese dialects, which sound very different but share the same writing system. Almost every Chinese can speak one to two Chinese dialects. One of the most important dialects is Cantonese and is used in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao.
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 Chinese pinyin is like English phonetic symbol and is used to help pronunciation. Except for children who are learning the language (or teachers who are teaching it) people in china do not use pinyin to read and write (very much like phonetics for English). Chinese pinyin tones are commonly added above Chinese characters for the beginners who learn Chinese.
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Chinese grammar is proved to be much simpler and less formulated than other languages like English or Japanese and Chinese has similar sentence structure to English: subject-verb-object (SVO).
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The most basic element of Chinese is Chinese characters. Every Chinese character has at least one meaning and every Chinese word is often composed of 2 Chinese characters (may be 1-4 characters). For example, the “car” in Chinese is composed of 2 characters: “Gas” and “vehicle”.
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 In Chinese there are about 1,000 very common characters, and about 2,500 less common. In comparison English uses at least 4,000 basic and common words.
There might be thousands of Chinese words; however, the meanings of these words can be guessed by the meanings of the characters, for examples, “vocabulary” in Chinese is composed of the characters “word” and “table”.
There are thousands of Chinese characters with different shapes and forms and although some rules apply it will still be difficult to learn them all. On another hand if you can recognize them you should be able to write an article in Chinese just typing pinyin on a computer.
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Can you eat a pill in the evening and wake up the next morning speaking fluent Chinese? The answer is NO, there is no magic and if you want to speak, read and write in your daily life like a native Chinese, it will obviously take some years!
That being said, some people find Chinese to be easy, while some other people find it to be difficult. However there are many foreigners in China who can speak standard mandarin Chinese without any previous knowledge after only 1-2 months staying in China. It really depends on which parts of the language you want to learn.
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