It's never too late to learn! A centenarian woman in China has started to learn reading and writing, and has mastered more characters than her age.
Zhao Shunjin is a vegetable vendor who had until now never learned to read or write. But after attending a 10-day literacy course she has mastered over 100 Chinese characters.
Zhao, who hails from Hangzhou City in East China's Zhejiang province, has not been to school and knew no characters except for her name before taking the course - part of a government-funded programme, state-run China Daily reported.
Most people who applied for the community literacy classes were aged between 70 and 80.
"We never expected [Zhao] would apply," said Shen Yundi, one of the teachers at Sanbao community in Jianggan district.
"Considering her age, we arranged one-on-one tutoring for her," Shen explained.
"She spent two hours learning every day.
"Sometimes she would come to the classroom accompanied by a relative or sometimes a tutor would go to her home to teach her in private," Shen said.
Zhao's son Luo Rongsheng said, "I pushed her to the classroom in her wheelchair. When we met friends on the way and they asked where we were going, she always replied proudly 'I'm going to study'."
Zhao passed the test at the end of the course, and received a literacy certificate on July 13.
She has since been sticking to the habit of reading and writing.
"Every day, she goes through her textbooks and reads aloud the characters and words," Luo said.
Since Zhao has bad eyesight, her textbooks were specially made by her son and the community workers. Characters in the books are palm-sized.
