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  • Do Cuba too!

    • Fun fact: the world bank prevented Cuba’s literacy program from being widely adopted because they feared it would be a gateway for people to start reading socialist literature and start revolutions

      The US attempted their own program, but it was plagued with inefficiency because it was run by a bunch of NGOs with little collaboration with each other or the people they were supposed to teach (compared to Cuba which made students and workers of all financial and literacy backgrounds teach each other).

      Later on the capitalist program was examined and the people in charge of it admitted that had they just gone with Cuba’s model, most of the inefficiencies wouldn’t have existed and their goals would’ve been met much faster.

      The program still exists today and it’s being used by indigenous or generally poor communities in South America, Africa, and some parts of the west (Canada and Italy, I believe). No one talks about this even though tens of millions of people are taught by Cuba’s program which they seem to charge at very reasonable prices.

      They obviously need the diplomatic support, but it’s insane to think they’re some cynical evil gommies when they really do care about people just because that’s what good people do. Not to mention, they have most of the world’s support including from the west even though they haven’t provided anything to them. They get support for simply existing and struggling against the fascistic giant north of them while also giving so much to the people who need it with little in return. It’s why my eye twitches when I see Ukraine abstaining or voting against ending sanctions against them despite their aid for the Chernobyl victims.

  • I hate to rain on y'all's parade, but the US measure of literacy is much more stringent than China's. America is counting literacy as the ability to use print materials like brochures and manuals fluently, the rest of the world just bases literacy on the ability to read a handful of test sentences in a controlled testing context. That's the reason that America appears to have gone down as well, they switched literacy measures. The 79% measure is people who are "at or below level 1 literacy", meaning it counts people who met level 1, people who didn't meet level 1, and people who couldn't even take the test at all because of a language barrier or disability. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

    I'm all for dunking on America but the apples to apples here would be comparing America's 96% (just excluding those below level 1) to China's 97%. Historical materialism requires a true material basis to work.

  • Also, Chinese script, even simplified Chinese, is significantly harder to master than English. I for example can speak Mandarin fluently (as a Chinese person in Canada) but can barely read or write it, and no you don't just "pick it up" if you can speak it because there is zero correlation between the spoken language and written script, it's all memorization of every single character. I would have to actually take classes or something to learn to read and write Chinese, which I am definitely considering doing.

    Actually, English is technically my second language since I was born in China (long story, left as a young child so wasn't my choice), and after having learned English and become fluent in both reading and writing it, I keep asking myself "how the hell can you be fluent in speaking English and not be fluent in writing it? If you know how to say a word you know 90% of how to write it unlike Chinese."

    So, sorry anglophones, even if China had the same literacy rate as the US, it would still be more impressive (not of the intellect of Chinese people or any racial bullshit like that, but the effectiveness of their education system and socialist ideology, which English speakers are fully capable of implementing as well with no excuse not to.)

    • Hi, I wanted to encourage you to learn to read and write Chinese. Don't push it off for later, go start looking for courses now! 我相信你可以的，加油。

    • Even I the anglophone am jealous of Cyrillic-script languages. Phonetic languages, where you say what you see, sound so convenient. Even worlds like anglophone have dumb gimmicks like 'ph' = 'f'. The grass is always greener on the other side.

      But even then, illiteracy often also means they can't read basic English, so it's not even them misspelling weird words like..... 'misspelling' and 'weird.', a large proportion of the USA would seriously struggle to understand our conversation [see replies to this]. And when our alphabet is 26 symbols (52 including capitals) with 10 digits and a handful of necessary punctuation symbols, Chinese script is off by magnitudes.

      And having seen some documentaries interviewing people in my country overcoming adult illiteracy, you realize this includes clearly intelligent people who within weeks could begin reciting their own small written speeches, who were often just neglected by the education system and then too embarrassed to seek help or reveal their inability.

      Obligatory The Simpsons lecture excerpt

    • I've been learning Mandarin for the past year and a half or so, it's definitely challenging. Learning to write in particular is incredibly challenging since learning to recognize the characters is an easier task than remembering all the strokes you have to make. My plan is to just use pinyin as input and just skip learning to write. English doesn't even begin to compare in terms of complexity.

    • Chinese literacy isn't only characters. First, all children learn to read Pinyin. THEN they get taught classical characters.

      • Chinese also has probably the most number of idioms and double meanings out of any language, most of which date back hundreds to thousands of years and are formatted for the time, basically the equivalent of if little snippets of Shakespearean were still in common use mixed in with modern English.

        Remember that Western claim that Xi Jinping had banned idioms as a way to control Chinese people, a la Newspeak? Anyone who knows Chinese should know just how ridiculous that claim is, you'd have to ban Chinese language in its entirety to do that.

      • Literally no native speaker of chinese considers Pinyin a real writing system. The latin alphabet barely works for Latin and its modern descendents, let alone a tonal analytical language in another language family. You're just another illiterate expat who's bitter at your inability to learn Chinese. Fuck off back to reddit.

  • For a couple of years now I have been working at a shop in a very, very impoverished and rough part of my city that is predominately occupied by low income minorities. I hope this doesn’t come off condescending but it took me a while to realize that a not insignificant number of our customers struggled to read the menu and price, info ect about products we had. I feel bad even for being a bit frustrated in the past by this, and we do our best to accommodate everyone and make them feel welcomed now I like to think anyway. But this is certainly a widespread issue that is rarely discussed or understood especially by those who reside only in wealthier areas or what not.

  • I'm morbidly curious to see if the Chinese ministry has stats on national literacy of English, and if it's up in the 50s.

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