Be skeptical. I am too. Especially when it comes to statistics coming out of China things where details can be very unclear and the skeptics have been right a l

Be skeptical. I am too. Especially when it comes to statistics coming out of China things where details can be very unclear and the skeptics have been right a lot lately. We can debate what the actual literacy rates are or how to define it. But it's pretty clear literacy in China has gone up in recent decades however you define it. More so, we can debate how big a part simplified characters were to the change in literacy, but my comment above was trying to clarify any confusion pinyin played that big a part in literacy improvement. Pinyin is taught in schools very recently but it did not play this big part in improving the % of the population who can read and understand Chinese like the article suggested. You do not need to know one letter of pinyin or even have heard of pinyin to read Chinese fluently. In fact, the push to teaching younger students pinyin and the roman alphabet in recent years may actually slow down a bit learning to read Chinese (pinyin is needed to use computers and mobile phones and helps when eventually learning English and is worth teaching early even with such a tradeoff). Also, memorizing of thousands of characters is not the major problem. Firstly, you don't need to memorize thousands of characters. Words are multiple characters. You can read and understand +90% the Chinese you encounter on a daily basis, involving thousands and thousands of Chinese words with less than a thousand characters. Yes, it is harder to memorize a few hundred characters compared an alphabet with a couple dozen roman letters, but characters are not all that difficult once you understand the system behind it (radicals, components etc). I know a few hundred million people who seemed to have done it just fine. Lastly, government policy alone could have improved literacy even without simplified Chinese characters. It wasn't a necessary step. And many Chinese can read and understand the gists of texts written in traditional Chinese characters even though they were never taught them. (similarly if you know English but were never taught Latin, go spend an hour reading about Latin and etymology you can probably start understanding a lot more Latin than you realize. errare humanum est)