In 1958, Hanyu Pinyin was popularized. How did people know how to read before 1958?
Hanyu Pinyin was a Zhuyin system that was proposed and implemented in 1958 to replace traditional Zhuyin methods such as the Latin-American alphabets and Zhuyin symbols. However, before that, Chinese characters had always been the main way of expression for people. Before the appearance of Chinese characters, people used some other symbols to represent phoneme, such as dots, horizontal, vertical, left, right, and other strokes to represent the initial and final. Although these symbols could represent phoneme, it was very inconvenient to write and easy to confuse. In addition, some people also used other methods such as oral pronunciation or rhyme books. Although these methods can also represent phoneme, they are not accurate enough and are easy to confuse. Therefore, although Hanyu Pinyin was popularized in 1958, people had already used various methods to understand Chinese characters and express their pronunciation before 1958.