Editorial on the Research Topic Reading acquisition of Chinese as a second/foreign language This editorial draws attention to the distinctive properties of the Chinese writing system and the difficulties it presents for individuals learning Chinese as a second/foreign language (CSL/CFL). Following the brief introduction, a summary overview is provided for the 19 submitted articles for this Research Topic, highlighting the contributions of these articles toward a better understanding of the universal and language-specific mechanisms in acquiring reading skills in a second language (Koda, 2007;Verhoeven and Perfetti, 2017).The Chinese logographic writing system (Sproat and Gutkin, 2021) has a number of distinct properties that set it apart from alphabetic orthographies. First, each Chinese character occupies a square-shaped space (e.g., 学, which means "to study") in sharp contrast to the linear structure of an alphabetic word. Chinese characters are composed of basic strokes (e.g., 一) and complex stroke patterns (e.g., 乙), which are completely different from graphemes of other languages in appearance. In fact, Chinese script has been found to have the greatest visual complexity among 131 writing systems (Chang et al., 2016(Chang et al., , 2018. Second, each Chinese character corresponds to a syllable, rather than phoneme(s), which is quite distinct from grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences that are universal in alphabetic systems (McBride and Wang, 2015). Chinese strokes are not phonemic representations and are unpronounceable in contrast to Korean script, whose characters represent syllables with visual resemblance of Chinese script but the symbols within each Korean character represent phonemes (Li et al., 2022). Moreover, the phonetic component of a compound Chinese character provides unreliable information about pronunciation.Both "logographic" and "morphosyllabic" are used in the literature to describe the properties of the Chinese writing system. Specifically, "logographic" is used to emphasize that identically pronounced but semantically contrastive elements have distinct graphic representations and "morphosyllabic" is used to emphasize that each Chinese character denotes a syllable as well as some aspect of the morpheme. The two terms are not mutually exclusive and the Chinese script can be described as both logographic and morphosyllabic in taxonomies. We choose the term "logographic" to highlight the uniqueness of Chinese scripts, i.e., the majority of Chinese characters carry constituent graphemes that are logographic. That's not a characteristic shared by alphabetic (e.g., English) or syllabic (e.g., Korean) writing systems. The term "morphosyllabic" does not carry the same distinctive appeal.