Literacy
Literacy and illiteracy are not simple opposites, but the end regions of a continuous scale. (The author of this article, a professional writer for 30 years, would like you to understand that he hasn't finished learning English.) Barely knowing an alphabet, or being able to read and write one's name, is not literacy. It is usual to define basic literacy as successful completion of a certain grade in school, but the grade varies among countries
Functional literacy in a language using Chinese characters (mainly Chinese and Japanese, but until recently including Korean) requires knowing something more than 1800 characters (as in the Japanese Toyo Kanji set taught in elementary and secondary schools). College graduates need to know 3000 or so. Some scholars have demonstrated reading recognition of as many as 6,000. Type designers, of course know, many more by shape, but not by pronunciation and meaning. More than 90,000 characters are known historically and included in Unicode 5.0, but there is no dictionary that large.
The most effective literacy campaign in India has been karaoke-style captioning of Bollywood musicals. People will often go to see the same movie several times over, with most of the audience singing along throughout. People who thought they were too old to learn to read have been astonished to find that they were doing it.
External Links
There are a number of published sources for national literacy rates and related data. The numbers are only approximate, because they depend on the definition of literacy used, and the counting or sampling methodology.
- UNICEF is a good starting place.
- Final Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey (The IALS of 2000 developed modern literacy metrics and examined them for 20 (developed) OECD nations.)
