Children master the basics of language in a matter of months. Then comes the challenge of learning to read, at least for the lucky ones with access to education. For Chinese children, this means grasping a writing system that corresponds to their spoken language in ways that are extraordinarily circuitous, complex and inconsistent. According to the literature, about 28 per cent of the 2,570 characters Chinese children have to learn in school are pronounced entirely arbitrarily. This includes all the simple characters that children are supposed to know by the end of primary school. The spelling-pronunciation correspondence in English is not exactly a walk in the park either, as famously shown by the many pronunciations of ough (rough, through, though, thorough, trough, plough and so on). Though it is less consistent than many other languages that are written using the Latin alphabet, English has many fairly trustworthy components. Groups of letters such as un-, mis-, -ing, -er, for instance, do not need to be read as arbitrary strings of letters but can be assimilated as manageable chunks of sound and data. In Chinese, the overarching principle is grapho-phonological rather than alphabetic. The phonetic part of a compound Chinese character - the part that shows how it is pronounced - represents a syllable in spoken Chinese. So, according to theorists, knowing how a character is pronounced is far more important in learning how to read in Chinese than it is in English. However, most Chinese children learning to read are only vaguely aware of the phonetic component of characters, if at all. So they are unable to make use of this key element as an aid to learning. Many children simply encode characters as a series of impenetrable, unconnected emblems and memorise the pronunciation along with the character as a whole. The preliminary evidence for the 'phonetic principle', as some theorists call it, came from a Hong Kong study. First and second grade Hong Kong schoolchildren were asked to pronounce fake compound characters made of novel combinations of familiar components. Their ability to do so correlated highly with their general pronunciation skills. Children who make better overall reading progress, it appears, are aware of and try to apply the information in, the phonetic component. Other studies have also suggested that strong readers try to extrapolate what they understand from the phonetic component of Chinese characters. So why don't Chinese teachers explicitly teach children about the meaning and uses of the phonetic component? They would, say researchers, but they make the reasonable assumption that to do so would be counterproductive and particularly confusing for poorer readers, since only 23 per cent of the compound characters in school Chinese are perfectly regular. This may be misguided, suggest Richard Anderson and his research colleagues in the US and China. Because pronunciation is so crucial in learning to read Chinese, even partial, narrowly applicable information about pronunciation is likely to enable poorer readers to use information that, to some extent, better readers have spontaneously assimilated. To take a parallel situation in English, a child unfamiliar with the word 'doubt' would not be able to predict its pronunciation or spelling. Yet the letters d, the t and the diphthong ou all carry their usual sound values. Stronger readers are able to tease apart this partial, familiar information from the unfamiliar whole. They are less likely to be thrown off by the exceptional, silent b. Picking up on partial data, in other words, makes it easier to encode and remember new words. Children spontaneously discover rules and try to apply them in all subjects. In basic arithmetic, some children figure out the importance of base 10. When adding eight and five, for instance, they mentally add up to 10, then add the remainder: eight plus two makes 10, plus three equals 13. Other children need to be told - the earlier the better. In Chinese reading as elsewhere, it seems, strategies that some children figure out for themselves need to be taught explicitly to others - sooner rather than later, and including those with seemingly very limited application. Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation everydaypsychologist@yahoo.com