At the time, I was living in Beijing, the capital city of China, and the first words I learned to read were Chinese characters.
Many Chinese characters look like pictures of the things they stand for.
So it's easy for a child to get the idea that these squiggles on paper stand for words. In spite of my early start in reading Chinese, my progress was slow, and it was some years before I could read even an easy book. Most Chinese characters are complicated ones made up of simple characters, and it's not always easy to guess what they mean. You have to memorize several thousands of these characters to be able to read. English Versus Chinese Things are different in English.