Once, a parent excitedly told me: “Miss Lucia, my child can already read!”

I asked, “What kinds of books has he been reading recently?”

The parent thought for a moment, then replied, “He can read aloud all the sentences in the textbook.”

At that point, I would usually explain: “Word recognition is the process of going from not knowing to knowing. Reading, however, is the process of moving from recognising words to understanding meaning.”

This distinction had existed in my mind from the very beginning.

It is a little like learning to count. Some children can recite fluently from one to twenty. But if I place five sweets on the table and ask, “How many are there?”, they still need to count them one by one all over again. Being able to recite numbers does not necessarily mean truly understanding quantity. In the same way, recognising the character 個 does not mean a child understands 個人 (“person”), 個子 (“height”), 一個 (“one”), or 個位 (“ones place”). Being able to read aloud a single sentence does not mean they can understand the wider meaning between sentences or between the lines.

When children are still at the stage of recognising words, their attention remains fixed on the characters themselves. But once they begin truly reading, their attention shifts towards the story and its meaning. During the word-recognition stage, children often stop and ask: “How do you read this character?” But once they enter the reading stage, their questions begin to change into: “Why did he do that?”

I have always felt that learning to read is very similar to learning to ride a bicycle.

I still remember vividly my child’s first bicycle ride: shoulders tense, eyes fixed firmly on the handlebars, concentrating with all his effort just to maintain balance. After some time, once balancing became natural, his attention shifted towards controlling direction and speed. Eventually, he could ride freely while looking around at the scenery beside the road. The bicycle had become a tool that allowed him to move through the world.

Learning to read follows a very similar process.

At the beginning, when children are still recognising words, they must decode each character one by one — its pronunciation and its meaning. At that stage, their reading often sounds like this:

“The… dog… is… running…”

Each character feels like a small obstacle that must be crossed individually.

Then gradually, they become able to read sentence by sentence more smoothly. Slowly, the sentences begin to flow, and stories begin unfolding inside the child’s mind.

That is when reading truly begins.

Eventually, children are able to enjoy stories and texts, and use reading as a tool for learning new knowledge.

Once, a parent shared that while walking through a shopping centre, her child suddenly read aloud a sign: 小心地滑！(“Caution! Wet Floor!”) He immediately stopped walking, then warned his parents to be careful. That was the moment when the parent realised that their child had begun using reading to interact with the world around him.

Even more interestingly, a child’s reading ability is only the visible surface of something much deeper. The invisible changes happening inside the brain are far more significant.

In the first stage, the brain is busy decoding individual words and characters. In the second stage, creativity and imagination begin to awaken. And finally, understanding and logical thinking are born.

Some children suddenly become full of questions:

“Why did he leave?”
“What would have happened if he hadn’t done that?”

That is because once word recognition becomes fluent, the brain is finally freed up and able to use its bandwidth to imagine, understand, and think.

One could say that when children are still at the word-decoding stage, they see characters and words. But once they begin truly reading, they see stories.

The first five hundred characters are simply the starting point of reading. They bring children to the threshold of the written world.

But only when children begin reading do they truly step inside.