Do you know how to read? - Just asking

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The United States currently has a literacy rate slightly higher than the global average but still far below more developed countries such as Finland or Japan. However, a 2022 year-long study by the National Center for Education Statistics proudly states that 92% of Americans are at a "Level 1" on their in-house literacy scale.
This number is seemingly at odds with actual literacy statistics, with 21% of Americans being deemed functionally illiterate in 2022, and 54% of adults reading below a 6th-grade level.
I'm sure many of you are like me and have had to sit in a high school class listening to someone struggle through the shortest paragraph you've ever seen, and in time we will all see Fuddruckers change to Buttfuckers as the technological revolution allows literacy to nosedive to levels not seen since the dark ages, but I'm mostly posting this thread to find out if you can read or not.
What's your best "this person needs pictures on everything" moment? I come from a state where you can't find a Walmart employee who speaks English so my pickings would seem a little biased.
 
Read, yes. I don't think my mother ever read anything more than a newspaper or magazine article after she got out of school, but my dad was an avid reader, and both valued education. I was reading well before I ever entered kindergarten - I have distinct memories of being very bored and confused when the teacher was trying to teach most of the rest of the class how to read. I read The Lord of the Rings in 1st grade, and was very bored with the offerings in the "advanced" reading tier throughout most of my K-12... Old Yeller at 1st grade as the "advanced" option? Odin's empty eyesocket, that was a low bar.

Spell, no. I had the misfortune to get a computer in 80s when I was still in elementary school. At least that's my excuse. Spellchecker has been my crutch all my life. And as much as I use a spellchecker when I'm typing, it gets vastly worse when I'm forced to write by hand.

A funny anecdote that might qualify for your "this person needs pictures on everything" moment about myself, actually: Sometimes when I was writing out essays in highschool and college - I thankfully got out of academia before everything became digital - and I ran into a word I was struggling to spell, I would put my pencil down and put my hands on my desk as if there was a keyboard in front of me and type the word on my desk. See, I've been able to touch-type since I was 10 or so... When I was going to school, the advanced typing segment of learning to type involved you having the keyboard covered with a cardboard box. So often I can spell a word through muscle memory, but when I've got a pen in hand, I just draw a blank.

Beyond that, I've been blessedly limited in my contact with the truly illiterate. There were certainly people in my college courses that depressed me, though. I mean, I know half of them were only taking a 200-level Shakespeare course because it counted for one of their requirements, and they figured they would get to watch movies or something, but listening to some of them read was really painful.
 
There's absolutely no reason why mass literacy should be a thing. Society could function effectively with no more than 20% of the population knowing how to read. As Adolf Hitler once said about the ukrainians in the territories occupied by Germany: the sufficient extent of their literacy should be knowing how to read road signs so they don't cause problems by walking under traffic
 
I've always been a good reader. I skipped the kiddie books and then started reading them as an adult to see what I missed. Math? Forget it. It's crazy hard for me. I had tutors. I studied for hours every day. And I still did poorly. But literary stuff was always easy. And I always do well in subjects that require reading comprehension.

I do have some gripes with the English language. For instance I feel like we should drop apostrophes from compound words to make them easier to type. Then I look at "cant" vs. "can't" and think it looks a bit retarded. Thank God I'm not a linguist.:lol:
 
Dysnomia dijo:
I've always been a good reader. I skipped the kiddie books and then started reading them as an adult to see what I missed. Math? Forget it. It's crazy hard for me. I had tutors. I studied for hours every day. And I still did poorly. But literary stuff was always easy. And I always do well in subjects that require reading comprehension.

I do have some gripes with the English language. For instance I feel like we should drop apostrophes from compound words to make them easier to type. Then I look at "cant" vs. "can't" and think it looks a bit retarded. Thank God I'm not a linguist.:lol:
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You can just avoid using compound words altogether, I suppose.

I wouldn't suggest it, personally, but I suppose it's an option.

At least we don't do the German thing of just slamming words together without spaces. That was the second worst part of learning German, after trying to wrap my head around gendered language... Odin's tits, what a fucking retarded concept, yet we're one of the few western languages to have gotten rid of that nonsense. But, seriously. Hochgeschwindigkeitszug? Go fuck yourself, Germans, you're just trying to excuse the fact that someone had a seizure while writing a dictionary.
 
I was reading way before I could even speak lol, I've been told stories of (and vaguely remember) sucking on a bottle while trying to read. I was really into Fantasy for a while- I read the whole Harry Potter series when I was I think about 6ish and then Deathly Hallows when it came out a little later, then spent the next four or five years reading intensely in-between picking up video games and board games as side hobbies. Loved all of the fantasy stuff and a bunch of sci-fi my parents had that they gave me from when they were a little younger.
Unfortunately, I kind of burnt out by the time I was like 11/12ish. I started getting really bored with fantasy especially and vividly remember complaining to my mom that "every book was the same". I still kind of hold that opinion tbh, a lot of the fantasy I've read (at least) has just been the same damn story with a different coat of paint.
After that I didn't read consistently (beyond the occasional nonfiction book) for like a year and a half. After that I started getting into comics via webcomic hosting sites, and from then on I've kind of just read those for the most part.

I very well could (and probably should) read some kind of book, and yet instead I'm sitting here, of my own volition, watching retards put transgender pikachus into their fanfiction webcomics.
Does that make me illiterate?


...yeah, probably.
 
Última edición:
My parents and grandparents are big readers and my mom used to read me her college science textbooks when I was a baby, so to me reading has always been a "this is what everyone does" thing. Occasionally we'd get people visiting our house and commenting on how many books we have like that's a weird thing.

I think most of my friends growing up were avid readers also, it was pretty normal for my friends and I to swap book suggestions. I've even got friends who were less into reading to try a few things ( two of them tried and then gave up on War and Peace, and we all gave up on Moby Dick)

But I also saw plenty of people who at high school age just could not get through what seemed like easy sentences and would bitch and moan about reading 200-page books. I can sympathize with people who just straight-up struggle with reading out of no fault of their own, but some people acted like reading was a horrible impossible feat comparable to the washing of the Augean Stables. At the same time, our school used the very annoying program called Accelerated Reader that made reading into a chore for even the kids that actually enjoyed it.

I've met one person in college who was full blown illiterate, couldn't write a single coherent sentence or even spell the name of our college. She even went to the school administrators over discrimination charges when a teacher point blank told her she couldn't read. Bitch, you literally can't read!
 
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