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.