Easily. They are different skills. Babies learn to speak long before they can read or write, so if they never went to school, they could speak, but not read or write.

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Mostly by watching a lot of television and getting to know the key words while talking.

Reading and writing is harder since there are lots of unpronounced letters and grammar to take care of which can make the words sound completely different.

Illiteracy has been a common issue for most of human History across all languages and cultures but I think youre not referring to that. In that case I guess it has to do with English not being directlynreadable like, for example, spanish, where if ypu read a P and an E it always read the same way no matter the word it's in.

clarify, please: are you asking how an individual can be illiterate?

i am confused by this question. spoken language existed long before humans developed writing to encode it.

This. My four year old was a solid speaker long before he could read the language.

Imagine if no one bothered to teach him. Or he grew up on a farm with parents who grew up on a farm…

Short and simple, it's a skill like any other you have to practise.
Even if english is your native language and you can read it, take a look at old english scriptures, even before Shakespeare and tell me if you can read it without practise.

I guess that’s what I’m asking. The reason why I’m asking is because I was helping a tourist with directions. The tourist only spoke Chinese, so I tried using google translate to help him. He then told me he didn’t know how to write or read Chinese. Sadly, due to this, I could not help him. I realise that this may not be a problem for the English language so I’m sorry for that.

You learn to speak a language by hearing and talking it (seeing and talking in the case of sign language). You learn to form the sounds and attach them to meanings based in context. If everytime you are given grapes and I call them sweets you will know no different until you interact with others.

To learn to read and write you have to be able to see and recognise shapes, associate those shapes with words and learn to replicate the shapes to be able write. Then you have to learn to put the shapes in a certain order to help them make sense. For example words go in a certain order with punctuation to help make sense. For example big bad wolf is right but bad big wolf is not but does it really makes sense as to why?

This is why it's easier to speak not write a second language and why people with large vocabularies can be illiterate

How they have been exposed to the language matters.

Written and read languages you are most likely to gain through traditional teaching. Spoken languages can be learned via subtitles on video media.

Even then spoken breaks down further. Someone will learn to understand spoken English before they are comfortable speaking it themselves.

For me learning Swedish I learned to comprehend speech, then to speak, then to read. My written grammar is still poor 15years later because I'm very rarely called to write the language.

Did you learn to read before you have learned to speak? Analphabetism is a "condition" wherein people lack the skills or knowledge to read or write.

Are you asking why babies are illiterate?

Are you saying farmers are uneducated and don’t go to school? SMH

No, I mean that historically, there is way less need to read on a farm than in a law office. I’m thinking 1820, not 2020.

Or maybe it’s because their are 8 different dialects in Chinese and you were using one they didn’t understand!

Chinese dialects share the same script. Even though spoken dialects are not mutually intelligible, the scripts generally are barring some minor grammatical difference that could be roughly understood anyway since you can understand the meaning of the characters.

Ou se trouve la bibliotheque?

That's French for "Where is the library?"

Congratulations, you now know how to read a certain sentence in French. But you probably don't know how to say it. How is that possible? Well, you've only been exposed to it in writing, not speech. Repeat that many times for many sentences and words and you are literate in French but unable to speak it.

The answer to your question is the same, but in reverse - you are exposed to the language verbally but never learn to read or write it.

If I tell you "hello" in Arabic is pronounced "Mar-ha-ba" you will be able to speak and understand the word verbally, but still have no idea how to read or write it because you don't understand Arabic letters.

I didn't understand this until I studied music.

Can just about anybody sing a song? Yes.

If you can sing, can you read music? Probably not, unless you have had formal training. I mean, you might be able to look at the staff and see the notes going up and say "Oh, it is getting higher here," but can you look at a piece of music you've never seen before and just sing it straight off the page? Most people can't.

OK, but let's say you can read music. Does that mean you can easily write it? That is a whole different skill that requires you to really know a lot about how music is represented in print -- what is a treble clef and a bass clef? What are the little flags on notes? What is a key signature, and what does it mean?

Speaking, reading, and writing work the same way. We all grow up learning to speak, but reading and writing are higher order skills.

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You know how you can be doing something like rock clombing and know the path to beat the climb without having the strength to do the climb, same for readings and writing 2 very different skills

ever met a small child under age five? they can usually speak, but haven't learned to read and write yet.

or a blind person?

illiteracy exists for many reasons.

if you moved to a foreign country you'd probably learn to speak before you learned to read and write, especially if the writing didn't use the alphabet. at which point you would be functionally illiterate as well.

You can be illiterate in any language. For most of human history, the vast majority of people spoke a language but could not read or write it.

> Or maybe it’s because their are 8 different dialects in Chinese and you were using one they didn’t understand!

There are in fact probably several hundred Sinitic languages (which are often interchangeably referred to as 'Chinese').

This is not true at all! Each Chinese character writes a word in a spoken language. Currently there are systems to use them for Mandarin and Cantonese, but mostly not for other Sinitic languages. The primary issue is that any given language may have words (including common grammatical function words) which have no clear appropriate character for them - either it's not clear which (if any) Middle Chinese word this word descends from, or it descends from the same word as another character, or there's some reason why speakers may find the character inappropriate for that word for other reasons (maybe it's developed a vulgar connotation in Mandarin, for example). Adapting Chinese characters to a new language, even if it's Sinitic, is not a straightforward process.

And of course, if you know how to write grammatical function words in Mandarin, that doesn't mean you'll recognise Cantonese's grammatical function words. Plus, many related words (which "should" be written with the same character) may have shifted their meaning - for example, 聞 meant 'hear' in Middle Chinese, and while both Mandarin and Cantonese have shifted it to 'smell', it remains 'hear' in its use in Japanese.

First you learn how to name the things you see and speak their names. Then you learn how to write (and read) those names.

Think about a leaf you just saw. The leaf is on the tree, the sound "leef" is in your mouth and the letters "leaf" are on paper or a screen. They are all clearly very different. These differences have to be taught.

Consider that the English speakers could have chosen to write leaf in a different way. For example "leeph" or "lief". So every English sound can be written in different ways.

Consider the words written as "tough" and "rough". You pronounce "ough" very differently in those two words. So written English letters can have different sounds when spoken.

Then consider how different a word can sound when spoken by people from different areas. The written language is still the same, and represents those very different sounding dialects.

To conclude, you can't know how a word is written from how it sounds, and you can't know how a word is spoken from how it is written. You have to learn both, and they are not the same.

Two things:

1. We are talking about dialect here, so what it meant in Middle Chinese is sort of irrelevant. Middle Chinese is considered an ancient form of Chinese, not a dialect. I'm not aware of any Chinese subculture that still uses Middle Chinese as the main language. When speaking about dialect, I believe we are talking about Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Shanghainese etc (yes, I understand it's debatable whether they are dialects or languages on their own). Even though some dialects might find some word/character choice inappropriate. It is not generally difficult to extrapolate the general meaning of written sentences.
2. Just because the more common modern usage of "闻\聞" has the meaning of "smell", it doesn't mean that the "hearing" aspect is completely abandoned. It is very common in Chinese language to incorporate some form of Middle Chinese into modern communication (Chengyu for example). I'd argue most people who speaks Chinese understand that "不闻不问" means "not listening, not asking" in a literally sense rather than "not smelling, not asking".

For 1, it is relevant, because the most straightforward way to decide on the character to use for a given word is to use the character used to write its Middle Chinese ancestor (unless this is a Min language, and then it gets complicated). When you can't do that for whatever reason, you're left with not a lot of options; in theory the best one is just to make a new character, but until the Unicode Consortium decides to include your new character in Unicode and you get good font support for it, you can only use that character in handwriting. So if you're trying to create a system for writing a Sinitic language that has even one novel grammatical function word that doesn't have a straightforward preexisting character that's appropriate, adapting the script for it is not going to be a simple process! I've actually seen examples even of Taiwanese Mandarin using pinyin or even kana to write words that exist in Taiwanese Mandarin but don't have an obvious Chinese character for them. Imagine if half your grammatical machinery has that problem!

For 2, that was just an example of one way in which being knowing what a character means in one language may not help you understand its use with another language. In that particular example the alternative meaning may still be well enough known, but that's not guaranteed to be the case in every such instance!

I understand that wikipedia is not a reliable source on its own. But take a look at this, and more specifically:

>Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a common writing system

I'm getting the sense that you think what you're describing is a widespread problem, but from my experience, it probably only happens with very uncommon edge cases. It's more akin to, as an example, Australian's usage of "loo" to mean toilet in spoken language, while "toilet" is still understood and used in less casual contexts.

I have a grandma who only speaks Fuzhounese (a subset of Min), yet has no trouble understanding "written Mandarin" (if there's even such a thing). Sure, she can't use the exact expression in written language and not have it be sort of weird. But again, people don't usually write that way. Even if she did write that way, understanding the characters still allows the reader to extrapolate the general meaning of the sentence.

> Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a common writing system

In context it seems like that line specifically is saying 'the obviously Sinitic languages are the ones that have a shared heritage of Chinese characters', in contrast to Bai and a couple of other languages, which could or could not be Sinitic on phylogenetic grounds pending better data and further analysis.

> I'm getting the sense that you think what you're describing is a widespread problem, but from my experience, it probably only happens with very uncommon edge cases. It's more akin to, as an example, Australian's usage of "loo" to mean toilet in spoken language, while "toilet" is still understood and used in less casual contexts.

That may be, but I'm hesitant to accept the idea that a writing system that fundamentally encodes individual words in an individual spoken language can work without adaptation for a wide variety of different languages that do not all share exactly the same set of words.

Here's a brief blog post by a specialist linguist on just the difficulties of writing nonstandard Mandarin with Chinese characters, with some good links to check out at the bottom.

> I have a grandma who only speaks Fuzhounese (a subset of Min) yet has no trouble understanding "written Mandarin" (if there's even such a thing). Sure, she can't use the exact expression in written language and not have it be sort of weird. But again, people don't usually write that way, and understanding the characters allows the reader to extrapolate the general meaning of the sentence.

Did she learn to read Chinese characters via Fuzhounese text written with them? Does she use them to write Fuzhounese? If not, how did she learn them?

>That may be, but I'm hesitant to accept the idea that a writing system that fundamentally encodes individual words in an individual spoken language can work without adaptation for a wide variety of different languages that do not all share exactly the same set of words.

And my point is that it's even though it's not 100% shared expression. It's a very high percentage and enough to be mutually intelligible in written form.

>Did she learn to read Chinese characters via Fuzhounese text written with them? Does she use them to write Fuzhounese? If not, how did she learn them?

What I'm trying to convey is that there's no such thing as "written Fuzhounese" unless you're trying to be super casual by trying to map what you speak to what you write word for word.

As an example, in Fuzhounese, "没" is used as the more general "negative" word instead of "不”. But "不” still exists in Fuzhounese and it has the same meaning. So when people write these days, even though you'd write how you speak in Mandarin and use "不" to mean no, it doesn't prevent her from understanding that it means "negative".

Out of curiosity, what's your experience with Chinese language?

> What I'm trying to convey is that there's no such thing as "written Fuzhounese" unless you're trying to be super casual by trying to map what you speak to what you write word for word.

That opens the possibility, though, that your grandmother learned to read at least in part via Mandarin (since I imagine that's how reading is taught), and that's another factor in why she can read Mandarin.

> Out of curiosity, what's your experience with Chinese language?

Not as much direct experience as I'd like, but I'm used to Chinese characters via Japanese and have a master's in linguistics. Chinese languages and Chinese characters have come up a lot in the classes I've taken, and I've done some scholarly reading on them now and again (though it's been a while). I've also studied a bit of Classical Chinese, and briefly tried to learn Mandarin a couple of times.

I actually found I can read Classical Chinese rather more easily than modern Mandarin with just my background in Japanese - Mandarin has a bunch of grammatical function stuff I don't recognise and words that have shifted meaning since they were borrowed into Japanese, but I could read short and simple sentences in Classical Chinese fairly easily even before I started studying it.

Just saw link. Having read through it, they are all cases of trying to "transliterate" the dialect (not sure if it's the correct word to use here) into Mandarin.

For example, yes “猪又” wouldn't make sense as written to Mandarin speakers. But here, it's an attempt to to make it sound as it's spoken while completely disregarding what the character means. I would argue that the correct script should be "猪肉", it's just that "肉” is pronounce differently in that dialect compared to Mandarin.

There's such example in Fuzhounese too. The name of the city itself is often written as "虎纠” in more casual context. But people all understand that it's for the sound and the official name of the city is "福州“ in written form.

Take a look at the links at the bottom; they may talk more directly about the issue.

Alright, I don't have an academic background on linguistics, just somewhat interested in it.

I'm a native Chinese from Fuzhou, so I speak Mandarin, Fuzhounese, and I understand about 50% of Hokkien due to my mom and my other grandma. These two are about as far as you can get from Mandarin in that they are completely mutually unintelligible. Yet still, there's a pretty direct mapping from sound to characters in all three dialects that when written, they are not very different in most cases.

I also think we're talking past each other a bit; you're mostly concerned with the ability to read something already written in whatever language and I'm mostly concerned with the ability to write something new fully in your own language. If you were to try and write a full novel in Fuzhounese with Chinese characters, how would that work? How often would you come across a situation where there's no obvious way to write what you want to say?

Basically the point I'm trying to make is that each Chinese language individually needs a conventional way to use Chinese characters; they don't just automatically work. I'll admit that maybe more of that would overlap with the conventions used to write other Chinese languages that I originally understood to be the case.

Actually, literacy is actually a lot higher in historical England than the records indicate. This is because "literacy" was measured in Latin, not English; and as such there were a significant (likely over 25% of the population) number of "illiterate" people who could read and write English at the equivalent of a modern 8th-grade level.

There's a more formal way of speaking Fuzhounese that would match onto written Chinese more accurately than the casual way of speaking. So if I were to write a novel, which I assume would be in a more formal form, it actually wouldn't be too different from how Chinese is written currently.

This might be a chicken or egg situation, but during public announcements and such, the announcer would read the document word for word, which you might consider grammatically more Mandarin, and it still makes sense to people who speaks Fuzhounese exclusively, even the illiterate ones. Whether they understand it through exposure or it just make sense fundamentally, I cannot say.

And yes, I was also think we're probably talking past each other a bit. I acknowledge that every dialect has some expressions that cannot be represented faithfully in both meaning and spirit using the standard set of Chinese characters. But in my experience, they are usually the more casual expression unique to the dialect. When it comes to formal speaking, it can usually map onto the written language without much trouble.

My primary argument, considering the comment I was replying to, is that there's a clear connection between sound, character and meaning in all Chinese dialects (barring those special expressions). So much so that if it was written out, maybe the ordering of characters can be a little different in some cases due to grammar, and that some character might be switched to another that still has the same general meaning, it still wouldn't be difficult to extrapolate the meaning of the whole sentence in majority of the cases. In that sense, the dialects share the same script and is mutually telligible when written out in most cases even though the spoken dialects are not.

I'm reading through one of the links and this caught my attention:

>For example, to sack / fire / dismiss is pok tao lo 卜头路 — (spoken by the mother), so natural, more emotional than when you say kāichú 开除 (as in Mandarin).

This sort of illustrates my point, "卜头路" is a transliteration of hokkien using Mandarin pronunciations, so as written, it wouldn't be understood by anyone who doesn't speak hokkien. An apropos analogy is "bone apple tea", if the listener doesn't know "bon appétit", then it makes no sense whatsoever.

Yet still Hokkien speaker understands what "开除" means and use it in more formal contexts, albeit with a different pronunciation from Mandarin. In this way, written Chinese can be understood by people who speaks different dialects.

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