For some pinyin characters, especially phoneme characters, as long as you know the minimum pronunciation rules, you can read the pronunciation, and then understand the meaning of the characters through pronunciation. Therefore, there are almost no illiterates in countries that use this language.
For ideographic characters, such as Chinese characters, it is easy to understand the meaning without knowing the pronunciation, or it is easy to know the pronunciation without knowing the words. If you don't study Chinese specially, illiteracy will definitely appear.
For vowel-marked characters (mainly Borneo characters), the countries and regions (South Asian countries and Ethiopia) that use these characters have a high illiteracy rate because of their complicated spelling rules, especially the backward culture and education level in the prevalent areas.
Extended data:
The purpose of "literacy" is not simply to let an illiterate person know a few words, but to let him better understand the culture, cultivate himself and master the practical knowledge and skills needed for a better life.
Illiteracy falls into three categories:
The first category, people who can't read and write, are illiterate in the traditional sense;
The second category, people who can't recognize modern social symbols (that is, maps, graphs and other commonly used charts);
The third category, people who can't learn, communicate and manage with computers.
The latter two types are considered as "functional illiteracy". Although they have received basic literacy education, they have great difficulties in the social life with highly developed modern information dissemination.
Baidu encyclopedia-illiterate