Many Japanese adults can't read Japanese fluently since the rules for reading are so complex, I think that makes the language objectively hard to learn.
And yet this article says that Japan hasn't conducted a nationwide literacy survey since 1948: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/583/ Whereas the most recent such survey in the U.S. seems to have been from 2003: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/
Very confusing. What are some better sources for literacy data? Especially when it comes to educational achievement I'm aware that OCED and similarly globally-ranked reporting structures tend to incentivize data collection gimmicks.
source:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_State...
> "Literacy in the United States was determined by the National Center for Education Statistics to be at a mid to high level in 2019, at 79%, with 21% of American adults categorized as having "low level English literacy," including 4.1% classified as "functionally illiterate" and an additional 4% that could not participate.[1] According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level."
Functional illiteracy is more like 4-8%.
FWIW, here's what I was found on Google:
> According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 21 percent of adults in the United States (about 43 million) fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category.
For me, the harder parts were Keigo - the politeness levels and how essential they are.