A room of seven-year-olds memorizes 3,000 symbols. It isn’t talent. It’s one method.
A Chinese child leaves primary school able to read around 3,000 characters and write 2,500 from a blank page. For decades Western researchers were sure the way they got there, the copying, the reciting, the endless drilling, was shallow learning that would only produce kids who could parrot. Then the test scores came in, and those kids were beating everyone. They called it the paradox of the Chinese learner. It was never a paradox.