This paper discusses some psycholinguistic and psychological bases of learning to read in two apparently disparate writing systems, English and Chinese. As an alphabet, English orthography has "more reason than rhyme"; relational units and markers (e.g., "hens" and "hence") are important. The combinatory properties of radicals and phonetics in Chinese logographs are parallel to morphophonemics in English. In both systems, linguistic segmentation and understanding of rules as applied to syllables or characters, to words, and to sentences are particularly important to initial reading. The mapping from orthographic representations to meaning, whether phonologically mediated, differs in the writing systems. Luria's claim of differential cortical processing for different languages finds some support from clinical studies and provides a clue to understanding learning to read in diverse orthographies. (Author/AA)