A brief review has been conducted about the important stages of child reading acquisition. In this review, we explained supporting evidences that automatic reading ability, the ability to match letters to phonemes implicitly, is the key cognitive ability that the child needs in order to acquire reading ability. We also explained phonemic awareness and parent reading are two necessary variables for acquiring the automatic reading ability. The relationship between the presence of phonological recoding in adult word recognition and the phonemic awareness in childhood was also discussed. Finally, the implication of the such idea on Korean reading acquisition and English learning as a second language were mentioned.