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Two experiments were carried out to examine how adult readers of English learn to acquire the orthographic structure and function of Chinese characters selected from reading material in their first-semester college course in Chinese. The first experiment, an online lexical decision task, demonstrated that the learners quickly acquired knowledge about the orthographic structure of the characters. With only limited vocabulary and without explicit instruction, they were sensitive to the characters' curriculum frequency and internal compositional features. Overall, these results were consistent with our previous findings (Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003). The second experiment further tested the learners' implicit and explicit learning of the orthographic component function of Chinese characters. In an offline unknown character identification task, these learners showed difficulty in making use of the functional cue of the known …