Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway.

Lol

deleted by creator

I disagree a bit with the article. Chinese is hard, but it is not that hard. While it is true that it is a language in which you will probably never run out of words and expressions to learn, once you have reached a certain level, you can more or less understand around 80% of what you read/hear (if is not something super specific/technical). My current level is higher than HSK5, and for the most part, I can understand most texts I find around.

Another thing that I disagree with is the assertion that you can't "cheat" Chinese by figuring out the meaning of something just by looking at it. While this might be true for beginners, once you have reached a certain level of Chinese, you can kind of guess or figure out the meaning of many words by just looking at its characters. For example, you I might not know the meaning of 效益, but if you know 益 has an implication of benefit/interest (like in 利益), you can figure out 效益 most probably means that or something related.

On a final note, your level will depend on how much you study: some people might take one year to reach HSK5, and some people might take three years to reach HSK2. Chinese is hard, but not impossible.

About Classical Chinese... not even Chinese people understand that shit.