> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?

I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds.

It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want.

I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.