Chinese speaker here: No, we are not. Classical Chinese is a very different language but generally the basics are taught in school. It definitely takes significant effort because the grammar and vocabulary are completely different.

Yeah that's apparently a thing. Same principle too, except with logograms rather than an abjad.

Written Chinese was reformed in the beginning of 20^th^ century to be closer to the spoken language.

Before that, it would have been true except written language was so distant from spoken, I would call them almost different languages (but that's because I'm no linguist, and someone here already told me that writing is not a language at all anyway), so the only literate people were able to read literature of the old