&gt; says it should just be converted to English (pinyin)<p>Hold up - you&#x27;ve made a slightly false equivalence there: that the Latin alphabet == English. English is frustrating for a few reasons - some of the issues I see first hand every day are<p>* many irregular verb conjugations<p>* inconsistent\confusing\unintuitive grammar<p>* irregular spelling\pronunciation.<p>However Pinyin is just a different representation of the sounds involved in Chinese using the latin alphabet - _not_ a translation into some English-like form. Furthermore it <i>appears</i> to be very regular.<p>I&#x27;m not sure where you&#x27;re from or what your language experience is, but one article I personally found pretty enlightening on this subject was at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinyin.info&#x2F;readings&#x2F;texts&#x2F;moser.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinyin.info&#x2F;readings&#x2F;texts&#x2F;moser.html</a>
. It&#x27;s written by an American PHd student of Chinese language, it&#x27;s a thoroughly entertaining read but the standout quote from me is around halfway down when he starts talking about Chinese people he&#x27;d met struggling to write a simple character. I&#x27;m going to copy-paste a big-ish chunk because it perfectly represents what the author of the linked post is trying to say:<p>&quot;I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like &quot;tin can&quot;, &quot;knee&quot;, &quot;screwdriver&quot;, &quot;snap&quot; (as in &quot;to snap one&#x27;s fingers&quot;), &quot;elbow&quot;, &quot;ginger&quot;, &quot;cushion&quot;, &quot;firecracker&quot;, and so on. And when I say &quot;forget&quot;, I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like &quot;knee&quot; or &quot;tin can&quot;? Or even a rarely-seen word like &quot;scabbard&quot; or &quot;ragamuffin&quot;? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn&#x27;t remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 &quot;to sneeze&quot;. I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the &quot;Harvard of China&quot;. Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word &quot;sneeze&quot;??&quot;