No, I never said that. I said that literacy has a very arbitrary definition. Rather, the act of drawing a hard line between literate and non-literate is a very

No, I never said that. I said that literacy has a very arbitrary definition. Rather, the act of drawing a hard line between literate and non-literate is a very Western way of analyzing language learning and doesn't scale well past a certain set of languages. By drawing such a hard line you end up with ridiculous conclusions such as that a child needs 12 years to be literate in Japanese. Sure, if you go by your arbitrary definition. You can say that the average kid in an English speaking country needs 18 years before they know what "erudite" and "ostentation" mean if you draw the line there.