Is it possible to be able to read Chinese without knowing how to pronounce it? To understand it not to speak it? How much can you understand if you learn the 1000 most frequent Chinese characters?

Hi. You can but only very partially and the learning process will be much more difficult than if you simultaneously learn to speak.

The Chinese language has a very large number of homophones (words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings). These words are often written using a common radical, combined with another character that explains the meaning: A typical example is 媽 (mother) = 女 (woman) + 馬 (horse). Because both "horse" and "mother" are pronounced "Ma", the etymology of "媽" is "the word pronounced the same as horse (馬) but that is a woman (女)" = "the Ma that is a woman" = "mother". If you don't understand this logic, learning will be even more difficult than it is for speakers.

Also, a lot of new words - especially of foreign origin - are written phonetically. There will be no indication in text that the characters should be used phonetically rather than for their meaning except in some rare occasions. In all other cases, you will have all difficulties to understand any sentence that use those words (or maps).

Last, I encourage you to realise that there are multiple spoken Chinese languages, and though official literature is usually written in "standard Chinese" (very close to Mandarin), writers whose native spoken language is different from that (ie c. 75% of the writers in China) frequently use local vocabulary and grammar variants, including special conjunctions. You will have all difficulties to understand them unless you realise that their written Chinese is influenced by their spoken language / dialect... In most extreme cases (frequent here in restaurants in Hong Kong) complex characters are substituted with homophones that are more simple to write. These will make absolutely no sense to you until you start learning to speak.

Of course you can, but not because of anything special about Chinese or its writing system.  There are a great many anglophone North Americans who can read French more or less well, yet cannot frame a single sentence so that a francophone can understand them.  Americans usually attribute this to a special arrogance on the part of the French, but it's really just helplessness — their spoken French is just that bad.

French has endings, which make it look more complex than Chinese, but in fact the vast majority of Mandarin words consist of at least two characters, so it is not enough to know the meaning of characters in isolation: you need to know the meaning of Chinese words.  But if you can do that, you can read Chinese, or French, or Arabic, without being able to pronounce it at all.

This actually happens on a virtually daily basis even in China. There are still a fairly large number of Chinese people who do not speak Mandarin, which is arguably what written Chinese today is mostly based on. Instead, they speak local dialects (such as Cantonese or Hokkien or Shanghainese), which have often vastly different pronunciations for the same written Chinese character. So you could fairly state that these folks do not know how to pronounce the Chinese language in its current natural form (i.e. Mandarin).

Note that the converse is also true - Cantonese speakers are all able to pronounce every written Chinese character using a Cantonese pronunciation - but non-Cantonese speakers (basically anyone outside of the Guangdong/Hong Kong region, or give or take 1 billion people in China) would read it without knowing how to pronounce it the way it was written (i.e. for a Cantonese speaker).

Chinese characters are mainly contain three part. How to write ? How to pronounce ? And what is the meaning ?

Yes, I’m a Chinese . When we learn Chinese in the primary school, the most thing we were asked to do is dictation . The teacher would pronounce a word or a phrases so we could it down.I admit this is a stupid way, but it works all the time.

First the pronounciation will help me to remember the word , and then is it’s meaning. It works well in the learning of the Chinese as well as the learning of English in my personal experience . It may be difficult to separate the pronounciation and the meaning . Just like when I see you lines , I can’t stop my mind from reading it out. Like most people would pronounce “ni hao” in their mind when they see it. That is all.

Maybe someone who speaks English can help you better.

How do we pronounce a “smiley face”?

We are increasingly turning to symbolic communication to enable people to understand without pronouncing anything. Look at the assembly instructions for many articles now. There are no words…just symbols. Knobs, switches and pushbuttons have symbols that are evolving to universal understanding.

I do not understand oriental script, but I believe a major fraction of it to be of the nature that each symbol has an associated mental image, sometimes quite a complex image. The reader learns how to express his/her interpretation of that mental image in the spoken language of his environment. Most do not have any singularly expressible sounds.

Absolutely! I can. I’ve spent many years learning to read and write Japanese, which gave me a huge advantage living, working and travelling in China. At the very least, you can far more easily recognise the letters. The first time I arrived, I wasn’t sure if the taxi driver was taking me to the place I’d asked for, but I could see we were following the same place name all the way, which was very reassuring.

I also found that shopping in a supermarket was helpful - not all packages have pictures or see through packaging. I could identify buildings, like finding a bank, and trying to buy a train ticket I was tempted to join the shortest queue, but the window clearly indicated in Chinese that it was about to close.

And the more you can communicate, the bigger the window you have, the more rewarding.