After reading the book "How to Teach Your Baby to Read", I started using the flash card method to teach my twin boys how to recognize Chinese characters and English words. They were almost 1 year old at that time. I found that even though my boys could not speak yet, they were able to recognize the Chinese characters after seeing them a few times. It actually took them longer to learn English words. I think my boys found Chinese characters easier to remember because Chinese words are inherently images. To them, each Chinese character is a picture that represents a certain object. It doesn't matter how complicated the Chinese character is, as long as the character relates to things that they are familiar with in every day life, they had no problems recognizing and reading the characters. By age 2, my boys were able to recognize about 100 Chinese characters. They are 4 now and they love reading Chinese books.