I’m nowhere near fluent in Chinese but I write way faster on my phone using pinyin than I can write English.
If you’re writing a sentence you can typically just type the opening sounds of most characters and fully type out a few and the software will pick up what the sentence is. That is you don’t even need to break it up into individual characters or words.
I typed “I need to go to Taipei tomorrow” just with the opening sound of each character with the exception of “xu” (the entire character) and the software picked up the sentence. No need to hit space bar in-between characters.
That’s really cool. I happened to listen to the podcast yesterday, and then I saw your post in the covid thread this morning, and when suzzer asked if the Chinese symbol that looks like a capital “I” meant “work”, I was like I know that! Because it was part of an example that they used in the podcast. The Chinese symbol for “work” + “water” = “river”.
Also, in the podcast they talk about how they have speed typing competitions and the winners are typing 240+ words/minute.
Yeah, I just listened to it and at the end when they got to the part of why the government pushed phonetic inputs over character components my thought was “because it’s incredibly simple!” and then when the host explained that pinyin is used to promote standard Mandarin “oh, right. It’s that.”
That said, it makes sense that typing on a computer keyboard would be much faster using character-components rather than pinyin. With pinyin you would get stalled having to find the right character from time to time.
In Taiwan they have a completely different phonetic system for inputting characters that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. I’ve heard from people that it’s less convenient for phone typing but I have no idea how it works really.
Pinyin is very convenient for input in large part because the software can predict the character based on the first sounds and also what characters are likely to follow it.
Actually reading a text in pinyin would be quite messy because so many characters have the exact same sound. The entire language would require context to decipher.
A Chinese linguist came up with a theoretically linguistically coherent poem that was just repeating the pinyin “shi” over and over again.
When Chinese people give there names orally for someone to write down they generally need to clarify the characters by saying multi-character words featuring the characters of their name.
Just adding on to what @Mendoza said, there are various systems that convert Chinese into the Latin alphabet.
For example, “Beijing” and “Peking” both refer to the same city. They are just different ways of transliterating the same characters (Beijing being the more modern one and the one typically followed within China).
The most notable challenges are that there are some sounds that are hard to represent and the tonality of Mandarin as a language (and Cantonese has even more tones… ugh). Most people whose first/primary language is English or another romance language aren’t really used to having to pay attention to tonality in the way Chinese requires, so it takes quite a bit of practice before they’d be able to pronounce even Romanized Mandarin properly in a way that would be understood by a native Mandarin speaker.
At least in China it’s all consistent because pinyin is the standard.
In Taiwan there is zero consistency as to which romanization system is used. Cities and towns will have a common character in their name spelled differently, the exact same street name will be spelled differently in different cities.
I was at an intersection in Pingtung City of 自立 road and 自由 road and the 自 was romanized differently on the same sign.
