Although most of European languages share the same alphabet more or less, each speaker becomes accustomed to recognising letters and sequences of letters used in their own language (eg. 'th' as recognised by a French speaker, an English speaker or a Gaelic speaker). That's how we can "guess" pronunciation.
The IPA was created as an attempt at a "neutral" form of phonetic writing. Personally, I find its application very limited and often unreliable. It certainly wasn't taught to me as a child.
For you as a Mandarin/Cantonese speaker, if you're learning only English at this moment, then I don't think the IPA will help any more than regular English texts.