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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

As someone who spent time learning Chinese in Beijing, this article is very confusing to me.

I learned Chinese, like pretty much every other foreigner, via pinyin pronunciation -- and it's great for language courses. And it's also great for road signs that foreigners can actually read.

But I never heard of pinyin being used by/for the Chinese themselves (except, now, as one computer typing system among many, although it still outputs in characters). All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.

And increases in literacy in China are simply due to widespread schooling and massive efforts at memorization of characters by children -- pinyin has absolutely zero value for functional literacy, because everything is still written in characters. (There are no pinyin newspapers or books I ever saw.)

EDIT: I see from comments below that pinyin is used with schoolchildren in mainland China, thanks. But I still don't see how this has helped literacy, when all reading material is still in characters.

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As someone from mainland China and learned pinyin in grade 1 of primary school, which happened in early 90s, in Beijing, I use pinyin daily, for inputting Chinese into electronic devices.

>All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.

No, we use latin letters in mainland China, Taiwan uses special characters.

The article is very accurate. Older generations like my parents have to learn latin lettered pinyin by themselves to use PCs and smartphones.

And the pinyin form of my name and home address are on my passport.

Can you explain the reasoning behind typing in pinyin to see the output in traditional characters? To a native English speaker this sounds silly and pointless.

Is it something that's mostly tradition or is there advantage to typing this way?

If you are asking why don't they type pinyin and leave it like that, then the reason is that Chinese, particularly mandarin, has a large number of homophones. Learning elementary mandarin sometimes felt like learning new meanings for the sounds "ma" "bu" and "shi" for two years. Despite having nearly the same pronunciation, all those syllables are distinct morphemes with unique characters to represent them, so characters are a clearer form of writing. If you are asking why they don't directly enter characters then the answer is that some people do, but it's not as convenient. To enter characters you draw it in a box with either a touch screen or a mouse and it's quite a bit slower, especially compared to the quality of autocomplete in pinyin entry systems.

Well explained. Does the similar pronunciation and many homophones cause any issues when spoken?

A litlle. Intonation and non verbal cues help a bit with disambiguation. Also, while pinyin can have tone markers, they are a pain to type and are often omitted.

It is not rare to see people who are having an oral conversation disambiguate words by drawing them with the index finger in the palm of their hand.

Not really, except that Chinese is a fantastic language for puns :D

Sometimes but not very often. The reason is that the rest of the words in the sentence together with the general situation is enough to make words unambiguous. This can be a challenge when learning because you have to map meanings onto both sounds and situations if that makes sense. It also means that Mandarin is great for making puns.

Does being situational make the language more efficient to speak? You don't need nearly as many words when the meaning is tied to context.

I've always been curious about east Asian languages and culture since they're relatively isolated from Western influence and historic ties to the British empire

This might be the case for illiterate people, but these days it's mandatory for Mainland Chinese citizens to complete at least 9 years of education. Different words with the same written form usually have different pronunciations, and different words with the same pronunciation usually have different written forms. It's rare for a word to carry different meanings solely depending on context.

Spoken Mandarin is virtually always spoken with tones (except when sung, or when foreigners speak it), but when written virtually never has tones (e.g. signs). Only childrens books write the tone marks. So, along with various other intonation, there's a lot more information communicated during speech.

Tones is the obvious answer that others have given, because they are often omitted in written pinyin. But even phonetic representation with tone annotation has problems. Take the following characters as examples:

他: he, him; it 她: she, her

These are both pronounced EXACTLY the same in spoken mandarin, and would be indistinguishable in a phonetic transcription. But standard written Chinese is more expressive than spoken mandarin because it allows for gender clarification.

Also take this example:

買: "mǎi" to buy 賣: "mài" to sell

These have exactly opposite meaning, and are differentiated only by tone. Without tone diacritics you would not be able to distinguish the two apart. Even with tone diacritics, reading is slowed because the difference between the two is only a small, semantically meaningless diacritical mark, whereas 賣 has an extra symbolic component that indicates its meaning.

It is worth noting that the female first person pronoun 她 is a relatively recent invention inspired by republicanism and the rise of venacular writing. Some writers in the 1920s and 30s used a more distinctive word 伊 (pronounced yi1) but over time the homophonic female Ta1 became mainstream.

What also happened then was an influential movement to fully romanise written Chinese and some of the proposals are radical even for today as they plan to do away with tones completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz

Pinyin was a scaled down version of these except it was never meant to replace the current writing system.

There's a language/dialect called Dongan which is written in Cyrillic without tone markers, and is to some extent mutually intelligible with Mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language

Sure it always happen. "Let me eat a Chicken" has the same pronunciation of "Let me eat a dk". Same thing as some one named focker...

> As someone from mainland China and learned pinyin in grade 1 of primary school, which happened in early 90s, in Beijing, I use pinyin daily, for inputting Chinese into electronic devices.

Do you think learning Pinyin first threw off your early pronunciation of English?

If people learned their languages in unique phonetic characters, would they be more likely to focus on learning the new sounds of other languages?

Like many other Chinese have replied, we do use and learned pinyin in school and use it to learn how to pronounce new characters. All the Chinese dictionary has pinyin in it.

Pinyin to us is basically International Phonetic Alphabet to English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

This is especially important because each region in China speak their own dialect of Chinese and sometimes it is almost an complete different language. As an Cantonese growing up, pinyin was my way of learning Chinese.

They are basically different languages (calling them dialects of one Chinese language is really more a political thing -- a bit like calling the languages of Europe dialects of Latin).

No, they are dialects.

They share the majority of the syntactic and grammar. Their written form are all the same. Pronunciation is the major difference. This level of unity is established probably since the Qin dynasty.

This is also true of Spanish and Portuguese but they are still considered different languages. If two people speaking different dailects couldn't understand each other they are surely different languages

To take a different perspective, calling them separate languages helps reinforce a nationalist agenda. It gives your citizenry another reason to feel separate from, and maybe superior to, other nations. Calling Spanish and Portuguese separate languages, instead of two Iberian dialects of modern Latin, helps reinforce the idea that Spain and Portugal are separate nations, and not just different regions of the same peninsula.

Yeah but maybe we should let linguistics and science decide what a language is or is not, and not bend the truth for political reasons?

I mean, 90%+ of Chinese people were taught and speak Standard Mandarin anyway. Language is not a reason for separatism today.

My understanding is that there is no bright line in linguistics and that language definition is by default messy and political

Mutual intelligibility is the standard criterion, and by that standard, there are different 7-8 language families in China.

It's not really by default, more like by necessity. Almost all categorization schemes for human cultural artifacts are necessarily blurry at the edges, and just because someone has provided a definition that is useful for one purpose (the study of linguistic differences across cultures) does not mean that it is suited for another purpose (rhetorically implying solidarity or separation between two sets of people).

Fair enough.

To be consistent with the linguistic facts, one should speak of the Chinese languages. You could also consistently speak of a Chinese language with dialects, and then also consider Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese different dialects of the Romance language; but that would redefine the terms from how they're currently commonly understood.

There's also Catalan: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/22/catalan-langua...

and the possibility that Catalonia might break away from Spain: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/10/catalan-indepe...

Well, you sort of prove my point, that it's a political thing, about the unity of the country.

Here's what linguists say:

1. From "Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems" by John DeFrancis:

"Chinese [...] is an umbrella designation for at least eight present-day varieties of what are usually called "dialects" but, since they are mutually unintelligible, might better be considered parallel to the various languages that make up the Romance group of languages."

2. From "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma" by Wm. C. Hannas:

"some eighty million or more people living in China [...] speak non-Chinese languages written in alphabetic or indigenous systems. [...] If we ignore this inconvenient phenomenon and focus on the speech of China's Han population, we find a collection of at least seven or eight mutually unintelligible varieties that in any other context would be called "languages," but which are "dialects" in China, in part for political reasons and in part because of a problem with the translation of the Chinese term fāngyán. The political motivation for claiming that these distinct varieties constitute a single language is fairly obvious: it is easier to govern a country in which the majority believe they are speaking one "language" (whatever the linguistic reality) composed of several "dialects" instead of several related languages.

[...]

Most linguists familiar with the classification problem acknowledge that the major Chinese varieties differ from each other at least on the order of the different languages of the Romance family.

[..]

We have seen that the Chinese languages differ not just in pronunciation but also in vocabulary and grammar, and that these differences are realized through unique morphemes (or unique uses of shared morphemes) for which characters do not exist at all, do not exist in Mandarin, or are used with different meanings and functions. Consequently, character texts in Cantonese and (where available) in Taiwanese are largely unintelligible to Mandarin readers. Many characters are completely unfamiliar; others are recognizable but make no sense in context. This occurs where conventions exist for writing the non-Mandarin variety in characters. Actually, most of these languages have no established writing system and hence lack even the possibility of being understood by readers of other varieties.

[1] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html

[2] http://pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html

> Their written form are all the same.

Regional languages in China have separate writing system when you need to write what is actually spoken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Vocabulary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzhou_dialect#Writing_system

Easiest way to see this difference is watch the news in Cantonese -- it is mostly 书面语 (standard) mandarin but pronounced as Cantonese, whereas day-to-day spoken Cantonese is completely different in structure and vocabulary. What do you think gets written in HK movie scripts? Definitely not standard written mandarin.

Yes. It's a bit as if French, Spaniards, and Portuguese would all correspond in Latin, and then say, see, it's one and the same language :-)

Your assertion is a political one, and not universally shared. The Central Party has incentives to make that claim for nationalist reasons, and has been doing so for decades, but that does not necessarily make it true. In my personal opinion, whether it is a dialect or not should be answered by the people who speak it, not by the people who rule them.

It is a subject of argument because there is no clear definition what is a language. There is spoken language and there is written language, then there is culture behind the language. Chinese dialects resemble complete different spoken languages. However, they all share the same written language. Chinese were rarely written down exactly as the way it was spoken, and this is being practiced since two thousand years ago (probably ever since the unification of the First Emperor). In fact, because of this written language, it reflects back to spoken language as well. Chinese may speak the way they write -- that is, they may speak the same way as their written form, with their various dialect pronunciations. In a way, there is spoken Chinese for the illiterate people, and there is spoken Chinese for literate people. Last, with a common written language, Chinese shares a culture. A language communicates meaning and the meaning is the meaning of the culture. With the same culture, there is little barrier communicating (even between people who speak different dialect). It is weird, but it is not unusual to have two people communicate in two different Chinese dialect -- won't that be the practical definition of a language?

And by politics, I think one really means culture. It is the need of communicating with each other on a daily basis forges a language.

Well, I was mostly commenting on the traditional Chinese. Traditionally most population are illiterate so there is little problem having disconnected spoken language and written language. With the modernization and majority of population becoming literate, there is a unification between spoken language and written language. That has updated both Chinese spoken language and written language to a common form -- dialects are becoming merely a different pronunciation form. Today, with schools mandate speaking of mandarin, dialects (the spoken languages) are on the way out.

This process take place in both the main land and Hong Kong and Taiwan. But due to the isolation, they took slightly different form. That is how to a foreigner's view, Chinese dialects appears to be different languages. This is not fundamentally different from between French and Spanish, only the extent of time differs. With only decades, the Chinese in Hong Kong and main land, e.g., are still viewed by most Chinese as the same language.

Born in a Hakka family, growing up in Cantonese-speaking region, having studied in places where ~50% of the students are Teochew people, and working with people who speak Wenzhounese, I consider Cantonese, Hakka language, Teochew, Wenzhounese, Mandarin Chinese all dialects of the Chinese language, and can't see why it is so special about Cantonese. At least Wenzhounese is much more different from Mandarin Chinese than Cantonese is, but why use the deviation from Mandarin Chinese as a standard anyway? Mandarin Chinese itself should be a dialect.

To be counted as a different language, I would say it should be as different as Zhuang language, Tibetan, Uyghur, Manchu, Hmong, etc. People who speak these languages might or might not come from politically controversial regions, but I don't think anyone would consider these languages Chinese for a second.

Having spent my first few years in mainland China, I can say that that the very typical kindergarten I went to taught pinyin and not bopomofo. Pinyin is the standard romanization in mainland China, not Wade-Giles (which seems to be preferred in Taiwan?)

Also, I would say that yes, pinyin did help me learn the language, and was especially important in providing a phonetic standard for characters.

Pinyin is the standard romanization in mainland China, not Wade-Giles (which seems to be preferred in Taiwan?

Taiwan is in a bit of a confusing place right now with phonetic alphabets for Mandarin. Here's my understanding - I'll use the abbreviations "WG" for Wade-Giles and "HP" for "Hanyu-Pinyin".

- They traditionally used Wade-Giles to romanise things for international consumption. ie Taipei (HP: Taibei), Taichung (HP: Taizhong), Kaohsiung (HP: Gaoxiong) etc.

- They officially switched to Hanyu Pinyin as their official romanisation about 10 years ago, but it seems to only have taken place on a very low scale. Ie the Da'An (WG: Ta'an) distrct in Taipei, or Wuri (WG: Wujih) in Taichung. With regards to people - the second president of the ROC-On-Taiwan is known in English by his WG name Chiang Ching-kuo (HP: Jiang Jing-Guo), while the current president is knowing exclusively by her HP name Tsai Ing-Wen (WG: Zai Ying-Wen). You can see this confusion manifest itself today - we still eat "Peking Duck" (WG), but we refer to the city as "Beijing" (HP).

- Some places in Taiwan are romanized with neither system, like Keelung, which seems to be some ad-hoc romanisation of Taiwanese Hokkien (another Chinese language entirely) that took root in the 19th century. Though interestingly enough, in the most common Taiwanese Hokkien romanisation system it would be "Kelang".

- In terms of education for locals, it's 100% Bopomofo as far as I can tell. I've also yet to meet a Taiwanese person who uses anything other than Bopomofo for input on their phones and computers. Apple atually added an extra tone mark to their Bopomofo IME (high tone is indicated by no tone mark, traditionally), which some Taiwanese people now seem to think is actually part of the alphabet!

- And lastly, in terms of education for foreigners, it seems to be a hugely mixed bag. Many foreigners now demand the use of Pinyin because it uses the Latin alphabet and it's more comfortable for them. A lot of places will still expect you to learn Bopomofo (which IMO has a lot of advantages - it's only 37 characters, stops you thinking in terms of your native pronounciation, and the IMEs for it are way better because they let you filter characters by tone). AFAIK Wade-Giles is dead for teaching, but one famous Taiwanese book for teaching Mandarin I used uses all three phonetic alphabets - WG, HP and Bopomofo, which was quite distracting!

Full disclaimer - my Mandarin is rudimentary and I am not Taiwanese.

Interesting. My only objection is to the bit about the current president. You said that she uses a pinyin spelling, but "TS" isn't a pinyin consonant.

She's Cài Yīngwén in HP, according to Wikipedia.

Whoops! I use Bopomofo exclusively these days - I forgot c is a "ts" sound. Looks like her name is indeed spelled Wade-Giles style.

To add to the confusion, Taiwan seems to have had their own adapation of wade-giles between 2002-2008 called Tongyong Pinyin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyong_Pinyin

The moral of the story is - when asking for directions in Taiwan, don't rely on the street signs much for pronunciation :D

> Many foreigners now demand the use of Pinyin because it uses the Latin alphabet and it's more comfortable for them. A lot of places will still expect you to learn Bopomofo

As far as I know, the rule of thumb is that exchange students are taught using Pinyin, and full-time students use Bopomofo. Teaching materials usually have both, anyway, so I don't think it's a big deal.

> I've also yet to meet a Taiwanese person who uses anything other than Bopomofo for input on their phones and computers.

I've seen older people use the handwriting IME on iOS. You can tell when you see stray simplified characters or other variants that can't be produced with Bopomofo :)

It's slightly more complicated. Besides WG and HP, Taiwan actually once used 3rd system called "Tongyong-Pinyin" (Tongyong means general/univeral usage), I'll use TP for abbr..

- In Taiwan, it's officially using TP during 2002~2008, the reason was to unify romanize/pinyin system for Mandarin/Taiwanese Hokkien/Taiwanese Hakka.

- It was then switched to HP at 2008 for English-friendlier environment.

- It is 100% Bopomofo in education. For most Taiwanese people we use Bopomofo as computer input method, but there are alternatives like Cangjie (based on how we write characters), Ziran (means natural literally, which is a mix of Cangjie and Bopomofo plus some heuristic). The alternatives are invented because there are too many characters sharing the same Bopomofo, you still have to choose characters after typed Bopomofo. Most alternatives have low market share in general public, but high market share in typing heavy jobs.

- Because WG was officially translation rule of ministry of foreign affairs before 2002 and they only recommend instead of forcing switch to TP/HP, so name of most city and people are still based on WG. So does those widespread words (like, Peking Duck).

Many would argue that not switching to pinyin was a huge error.

Chinese literacy isn't necessarily that great...

E.g.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-literacy-rate-in-China-so-h...

I started learning mandarin only a few months ago, but from what i learned so far, there is no easy way to switch from 汉字 to pinyin. Pinyin is an essential learning tool, but loses to much context and meaning encoded in the chinese characters. Even texts in the textbook somewhere after the 10th lesson start making much more sense when written in chinese characters than in pinyin.

It's not trivial - I would not want to read an English or German text written in IPA. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that it is quite possible to write Mandarin in some sort of alphabetic script quite easily.

What people have been doing in Chinese is basically write only one syllable of a multi-syllable word, which would be ambiguous in speech, but disambiguated in writing by the character. But then, if your writing were more phonetic, you'd just have to write the full word.

I don't quite understand what you mean. In modern standard mandarin it is pretty much one character = one syllable. They'd have to travel 3000 years back in time to recover the lost syllables.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

My point is that written Chinese is much terser than spoken Chinese (particularly classical Chinese, of course) and that this is enabled by the disambiguation inherent in the characters. That is, where in spoken language you'd use a two-character word, when writing it would be sufficient to write just one character to evoke what's meant.

Now, if you were to write in some sort of alphabetical script, you'd just write the full two-syllable word.

Slighly offtopic. Our own languages start incorporating pictograms and hieroglyphs, there are a little over 1000 emoji codepoints. How many syllables do you need to spell out an emoji?

Virtually all languages use semantic digits to represent numbers. Just like the way you used "a little over 1000 emoji", instead of "a little over one thousand emoji". There's 10 "semantic" digits to the 26 "phonetic" letters on a keyboard.

To understand how pinyin helps Chinese become literate you have to start from a Chinese perspective. For an illiterate Chinese, he/she would be fluent in the spoken Chinese. So the barrier is the connection between written characters and pronunciations. Pinyin bridges that. With starter reading materials that are annotated with Pinyin, people can read (sound) the material and understand the material. So pinyin lets people read materials that even when it contains characters that they don't know. Pinyin lets people read, and by reading, people learn the written form and become literate.

This article is very accurate. Everyone in mainland uses pinyin daily for inputs. Only the older generation uses hand wiring for inputs.

I don't know the stats but 3 out of 10 people I know use Wubi for input instead of Pinyin. Wubi needs to be learned from the ground up but is faster to type by a half.

I think I understand your confusion. I also spent time as an ex-pat in China. This is a bad sentence from the article:

"Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now almost all can."

In reads like the development of Pinyin is what led to this big change in the % of Chinese people who can now read. That is not correct and very misleading.

Pinyin was not the catalyst nor the major reason for changes in literacy levels. Rather it was new education policy and development of the new Simplified Chinese Characters (Newer Chinese characters with fewer line strokes in them - makes reading and writing much much more simple - it is still used today and is the official character language in China).

Pinyin was and is a huge deal. For foreigners learning Chinese and more importantly later on when it was chosen to be utilized as the input method when technology developed that required putting the Chinese language into computers and mobile phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

I'm a little skeptical of both the claimed literacy rate and of simplified characters' part in the increase of literacy.

The replacement of characters on a phonological basis is good, but you still have to memorize thousands of characters, simplified or not. Further, I've never seen how "literacy" is defined for those statistics.

IIUC, pinyin was originally proposed as a replacement for characters, and there was some interest when the communist government took over, but the choice was finally made in favor of simplification.

Agree. Simplification just saves some strokes when writing by hand (and when hand writing "cursive style", you skip/elide/join strokes anyway).

Initially, it might even make things more confusing: In traditional, you immediately see that 言 is part of 語, but the same radical in simplified 语 looks different. Similarly, 金 in 錢, but different in 钱.

Be skeptical. I am too. Especially when it comes to statistics coming out of China things where details can be very unclear and the skeptics have been right a lot lately.

We can debate what the actual literacy rates are or how to define it. But it's pretty clear literacy in China has gone up in recent decades however you define it. More so, we can debate how big a part simplified characters were to the change in literacy, but my comment above was trying to clarify any confusion pinyin played that big a part in literacy improvement. Pinyin is taught in schools very recently but it did not play this big part in improving the % of the population who can read and understand Chinese like the article suggested. You do not need to know one letter of pinyin or even have heard of pinyin to read Chinese fluently. In fact, the push to teaching younger students pinyin and the roman alphabet in recent years may actually slow down a bit learning to read Chinese (pinyin is needed to use computers and mobile phones and helps when eventually learning English and is worth teaching early even with such a tradeoff).

Also, memorizing of thousands of characters is not the major problem. Firstly, you don't need to memorize thousands of characters. Words are multiple characters. You can read and understand +90% the Chinese you encounter on a daily basis, involving thousands and thousands of Chinese words with less than a thousand characters. Yes, it is harder to memorize a few hundred characters compared an alphabet with a couple dozen roman letters, but characters are not all that difficult once you understand the system behind it (radicals, components etc). I know a few hundred million people who seemed to have done it just fine.

Lastly, government policy alone could have improved literacy even without simplified Chinese characters. It wasn't a necessary step. And many Chinese can read and understand the gists of texts written in traditional Chinese characters even though they were never taught them. (similarly if you know English but were never taught Latin, go spend an hour reading about Latin and etymology you can probably start understanding a lot more Latin than you realize. errare humanum est)

> Rather it was new education policy and development of the new Simplified Chinese Characters (Newer Chinese characters with fewer line strokes in them - makes reading and writing much much more simple - it is still used today and is the official character language in China).

Then why do Hong Kong and Taiwan have higher literacy rates?

EDIT: Why the down votes? The parent is making an unsubstantiated claim for which there is conflicting evidence:

1) Reading simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as some characters with distinct meanings are ambiguously combined, and semantic information stripped from many other characters so if you aren't quite remembering that character you aren't given any hints.

2) Writing simplified is not objectively easier in the inside view as many of the components are changed in form from the characters they derive from, and again some semantic clues are stripped from the character. So there may be slightly fewer characters composed of slightly fewer strokes on average, but those aren't the metrics one should use for measuring difficulty -- a character with more strokes can be easier to write on demand because the strokes are part of components that carry semantic meaning. You don't have to remember each little detail, just the broad gist of a plot for the character and then systematic rules fill in the rest.

3) Finally in the outside view, non-mainland communities like Hong Kong and Taiwan have always used and continue to use the traditional characters. And these communities have higher literacy rates across the board compared with mainland China.

People who have already learned simplified-only find simplified characters easier to read. That shouldn't be surprising, but it is not objective truth. And the PRC likes to toot its own horn and say that simplified characters are cleaner, neater, simpler, more modern, led to higher literacy rates, cure cancer, etc. But that doesn't make it true without further substantiation either.

Hey, I didn't down vote you but based on your question and your edit of an "unsubstantiated claim for which there is conflicting evidence" I think you may have mis-interpreted my comment.

Apologies for any confusion. I was not making a claim nor comparing between characters used by PRC vs. Taiwan vs. Hong Kong, in particular I wasn't ranking them as better or worse or easier or harder.

I understand there are ongoing differences, posturings and debates between PRC and Taiwan and Hong Kong, including about language, and the whole thing is serious and complicated. Bro, I have no dog in that fight. Good luck y'all.

Maybe see my other comment as it goes into more detail. But just on a basic level I think you have mis-interpreted the words "simple" and "easy". A pretty common mistake I have made in the past too. The characters are called "Simplified Chinese Characters" not "Objectively Easier Chinese Characters". The definitions of simple and easy are different. Context matters too.

For example: Contributing useful comments to a discussion on Hacker News is very simple. Clearly it is not easy.

I'm a native mandarin speaker. In my experience Pinyin was like a jump-starter of my self-assisted language learning--you can easily lookup words in dictionary with Pinyin and fill you mind with Chinese words. Also some entry-level books comes with Pinyin on top of the Chinese letters so you can learn how to pronounce by your self. After 1-2 years one can read Chinese and Pinyin will be put away.

One great thing is you can precisely pronounce name of a street or a medicine with less effort. Great for communication in daily life.

pretty much all children books in China include under Chinese characters also pinyin, exactly because it's used to teach children

i would not say pinyin didn't play role in increasing literacy levels, but it was one of the factors together with simplification of characters and wider availability of education

I think bopomofo is only used for learning in Taiwan, where it's also used for keyboards sometimes.

Incidentally, bopomofo is also pretty neat. It's based off common characters with the sound of the letter.

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