“How do chinese kids learn to read chinese?”
Every Chinese character has an elaborate story associated with it, including substories for various strokes in the character. Some of these stories are historical in nature, but many are based on fables and fairy tales that go back hundreds of years.
So, they don’t actually memorize whole words, but have an elaborate array of associations on which to pin the words.
One of the most basic and simplest words in Chinese is a squarish like symbol with a vertical line through it, with that word being the name of the Chinese country itself, and it symbolizes the fact that the Chinese have historically considered their country to be the center of the world.