I'm Illiterate in over 160 languages!

I have been travelling to Taiwan occasionally for business, and although I've made some effort to learn Mandarin Chinese, I've not really had the time to make a serious study of it, so I know only a few phrases.  The single most useful thing I can say is "I can not speak Mandarin.  Can you speak English?"  My favorite response to that was a guy who responded in perfect, unaccented west coast American English, "Yeah, what's up?"  The reason I'd needed to speak to that particular person was because I couldn't figure out which "cycle" button to press on the coin operated washing machine I had just dumped my clothes and money into.  The operating instructions, quite helpfully, were in Chinese and English, but step four was "select cycle."  All five of the cycle buttons were labelled only in Chinese.  I can't tell "ultra gentle non-agitating non-wash" from "shred your clothes and set them on fire," so I didn't really want to just pick a button at random.  And this was only one of many experiences that has taught me how utterly terrible it is to be illiterate.

There is a LOT of good information written all around us, to the point that we take it for granted, and often don't even realize when we're absorbing data from our environment.  But when that information isn't there, you really miss it.  Ideographic Chinese is so completely unintelligible to me that it effectively isn't there.  And when I want to get something as simple as a bottle of juice at 7-11, it becomes apparent.  I don't like to drink caffeine or artificial sweeteners.  When I picked up a grape juice bottle the other day, the only thing I could read on the label was "100%," which I eventually assumed was most likely "100% juice."  But it could well have been "100% of your day's vitamin C," or "100% recycled bottle!" or "100% rocket blast wake up caffeine super energy cocktail!"  And yes, I could have started asking people around me, but then I'd also need to explain in at least some detail what I was trying to avoid.  If I had gone through that exercise, then I would always know in the future that I could buy that one item.  But still, coming from a world where I can instantly know quite a lot of details of that product just by reading the label, illiteracy is a jarring change.

Maybe that's part of the secret to how people get by without being able to read:  They always have, so they just aren't acclimatized to the huge chunk they are missing.  But when an adult learns to read late in life, do they undergo a period of realization of how much richer their experience of the world can suddenly become?  If you've taught any adult reading classes, please comment below.  I'd love to know.

And maybe I should renew my efforts to learn some written Chinese as well...