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Exactly what I was thinking. Maybe we don’t understand the Chinese pictograms or whatever they are or how they are taught or something, because it seems like a pretty obvious question.

I never understood why they didn’t teach some sort of universal shorthand instead of cursive. Cursive is faster than printing, but if that’s the point why not teach something that’s waaay faster than both? Instead of learning two very similar styles of writing the language you speak. Maybe this is the reason, short hand uses symbology of some sort for many common words and takes more time to learn?

Freegards

“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.

"How do chinese kids learn to read Chinese?"

Not very easily.
Repetition is the main thing used in teaching Chinese language (writing and speaking are taught separately).
There is also a "sound-like" techniques used called "Bo Po Mo Fo" which uses "sound-like" pictograms to learn how the combinations of pictograms should work together.
It is very hard. But it is mostly repetition.

My Son just came into my office and I asked him. He is 18 and a recent high school graduate.
He basically said the same thing as above - but added "It's no that hard. We used Bo Po Mo Fo and learned the sounds and then learned to put them together. It's only 3 pictograms, at most, for most words and then an accent mark. Tone rising, tone falling, or tone remaining flat, per word."

Trust me...it's hard...very very hard.

Here’s a short response to your good question about how kids learn Chinese.

The English language has 100,000 up to 1 million words. Chinese has maybe 5- or 10,000 words for ordinary people. They achieve this minimalism by getting rid of all the small words. “No pain, no gain” is a typical Chinese sentence.

Second, all the Chinese ideograms, just like Egyptian hieroglyphics, start from a pictorial basis. So each ideogram has some clues in there, some reminders of the word’s past. And note that the ideograms do not have upper and lower case or any other variations. They are designed to be read visually and each character has distinctive features that make this easy.

Third, the Chinese do what you have to do if you have a symbol language, which is to make the students practice all the time, drawing the symbols, over and over and over. Learning Chinese means endless calligraphy.

This was one of the giveaways going back to 1931 that the education establishment was engaged in a hoax. They actually said that the children just have to be shown the word, and they will know it, almost like waving a magic line. But English words look a lot alike. There’s so many of them. And if you have any hope of remembering even a simple word like house, you have to draw it over and over and over again. But this was never required in our public schools.

And really, from what I can tell, if you frankly admitted you were trying to prepare people that you could control, then you would just eliminate English vocabulary until you had perhaps 800 essential words, and you printed and presented these words the same way all the time (e.g., uppercase), and you made the children draw them over and over, then you could perhaps create a whole population that was reading via whole word. They would probably be hesitant, plotting readers. The amount of material they can read would be very limited and simple..... And in fact this weird extreme fantasy seems to be what was behind whole word all along. The commissars would create a semi-literate population, incapable of much abstract thought, without ever admitting that’s what they were doing. Remember, that was the whole point of Orwell’s Newspeak.

This little video tries to explain sight-words versus phonics in a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdiWO_Ntdxw