How is pronunciation discussed in Chinese? Here's an English example:


  Learner: Wait, how is c-o-w pronounced?
  Native: COW, like a K sound followed by ow.


But in Chinese there are no phonetic letters. So how are children taught how to pronounce something, other than to hear the difference by someone who already knows it? Unless they're taught pinyin (which didn't even used to exist), how on earth could you specify the difference between, for example, j and q, if the learner were uncertain which sound was being used in the pronunciation of a given word or character?
Nowadays schoolchildren are taught Pinyin pretty thoroughly first, so they know how to correctly pronounce Pinyin. Then when learning new words, all they have to do is learn the Pinyin. A lot of primary/elementary textbooks will have annotations like this:



Here's a typical Chinese primary school blackboard:



Here's a Taiwanese equivalent of this sort of annotation, usually used on difficult characters:



While we're at it, here's a Japanese equivalent: