Illeterate

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The literacy rate in the United States is 99%, which I suppose is pretty good -- but the converse of that means that 1% of our population is illiterate: 2 Million adults in America can't read. It's hard to internalize this because to me, and likely to you who is reading this right now, the concept of illiteracy is so foreign. Reading is simply part of language, which in turn is part of thought, part of life. Processing our native tongues, sentances simply flow out of books, websites, and directly into our minds. Learning a new language, we always start in a classroom, copying down words into notebooks repeatedly until they too become part of our conciousness. Our school system reinforces its visual learning approach even when it comes to written language. Without a word having a written, visual form, it does not exist.

Why do I write about illiteracy? Because here, in Israel, I am illiterate. Like I imagine most of those three million poor souls in the US, I have at several points learned the alphabet. I know most of the letters, and can sound out words, especially if I know in advance what they are. But I can't read. Not being able to take in road signs at a glance, they are useless. I can pick out a few simple, distinctive words on menus, but mostly I need to ask the waiter for recommendations and hope that they do more than point. Newspapers? Forget about it.

It's really not much of an issue -- Israel is mostly a bilingual society with plenty of English around. It's more just a curiosity both for me and those I interact with. My spoken Hebrew is not great, but having spoken it as a mother tongue for a few years at the beginning of my life, my accent is pretty good -- I can be confused, if not for a native speaker, then at least for one of the many Americans who turned Zionist and re-branded themselves as Israeli. So it strikes people as odd when I politely point out to a waiter or hotel clerk, with well pronounced words, that I cannot read a damn thing in the language I am fluently speaking.