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Interesting that the introduction of Pinyin (Chinese Phonetic Alphabet) prior to learning the Chinese characters appears to have transformed Chinese literacy rates (Meng, 2002) - although literacy is defined by the recognition of 1500 characters.
Introduced in first and second grade, prior to character recognition it appears to bridge the gap where characters have no visible way of encoding pronunciation.
Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet letters to transcribe exact pronunciation (Lin et al., 2010) and provides a convenient way to identify unfamiliar characters (Friedlin, 2010)by reactivating spoken associations and linking that to the visual characters.
Perfetti and Tan (1998) suggest that phonology is activated in word recognition across writing systems, even those that do not follow the alphabetic principle.
Lin et al. (2010) found that high accuracy levels of Pinyin predicted word reading in the following year and suggested that the alphabetic principle facilitated early reading development even in writing systems that do not function as alphabets.
Lin et al.'s (2010) data offers converging evidence for the universal phonological principle in reading (Rayner, 2012). https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/01/07/phonics-the-lever-of-civilisation
