How is it possible that roughly 50% of Americans can’t read above a 6th grade level and how are 21% just flat out illiterate?

armchair_progamer@programming.dev to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 502 points –

From https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/14phpbq/how_is_it_possible_that_roughly_50_of_americans/

Question above is pretty blunt but was doing a study for a college course and came across that stat. How is that possible? My high school sucked but I was well equipped even with that sub standard level of education for college. Obviously income is a thing but to think 1 out of 5 American adults is categorized as illiterate is…astounding. Now poor media literacy I get, but not this. Edit: this was from a department of education report from 2022. Just incase people are curious where that comes from. It does also specify as literate in English so maybe not as grim as I thought.

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That's really impressive, I do wish I took learning another language more seriously when I was younger. Everyonce Ina while I try to dig back into it but lose motivation for one reason or another.

What did you find to be the most helpful starting out?

With English, finding the motivation is easy, since pretty much all media, be it movies or games, is in English. I learned the basics in school, but most of my vocabulary is from games.

I have been thinking of learning fourth language, but it's hard to find a good enough reason for it. Maybe I should just change games to appropriate language? At least it would improve replayability, since 90% of the plot would be missed.

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