Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.

Probably not. Toddlers generally don't have the brain to learn any reading. Spanish's advantages in reading isn't how young you can start learning to read, it is how fast you can stop reading. Spanish schools stop teaching reading takes about 5 years to learn, English 6, and Japanese 9 - after that much training kids are finally considered to read anything. (sometimes we talk about college level reading, but that is more about mastery of topic specific topic - Doctors, lawyers, and engineers each have special vocabulary that needs extra training to read, but they cannot read each other's technical papers)

I learned how to read in six months.

My kid took two and half years.

The Chinese take 10 years.

So what? Are the Chinese terribly educated?