Perhaps they mean that chinese doesn't have a readable alphabet, but rather one must memorize entire characters and their pronunciations.

what is A B C？

Yes, use ㄅㄆㄇㄈ instead of a b c. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin

Maybe they suggest that you skip pinyin, the Chinese phonetic symbol , and learn the character directly. I think it can work .You can learn the pronunciation from mp3 or your teachers. You know that pinyin was just invented about 60 years ago.Before that ,Kids didn't learn pinyin at all when they start their Chinese study. But we live in a world of computers now. If you want to write on your computer,pinyin is an easier and more convinient input method than any others. If you don't want to input charaters on computer, you may ignore pinyin.

there's no ABC in Chinese language only in phonetic transcription called "pinyin"