You&#x27;re right, I should not equate English with pinyin. I think however, pinyin as the solution is more indicative of how Western focused (especially with the proliferation of English) the entire world is. Or at least specifically with this author&#x27;s viewpoint.<p>I have learned pinyin, and basically it is the easiest way to input onto a US-English keyboard (as he says), but you essentially lose all underlying meaning of the character&#x27;s history if you&#x27;re learning Chinese based off pinyin. Essentially the same as removing all meaning of what a prefix, suffix and root of a word is in English. For example: &quot;Imperialism&quot;: I am sure you can tell me that the suffix is (&quot;-ism&quot;) and what it&#x27;s meaning is (&quot;belief in&quot;&#x2F;advocacy) and you can probably tell me the origins&#x2F;meanings of &quot;Imperial&quot; (empire) and so if you put those two words together an English speaking person would understand &quot;Imperialism&quot; as advocacy of an empire. But what is &quot;Imperialism&quot; in English if it is spelled &quot;diguozhuyi&quot;? That is what you lose when you switch to a pure romanization. And writing this post to you know makes me realize what I hate so much about the article. He throws away any meaning Chinese characters have for the sake of simplicity for his self benefit.<p>Taiwan has an alphabet like equivalent called &quot;zhuyin&quot; or bopomofo after the first 4 characters. The author never mentions this because I&#x27;m guessing he just asked some colleague in China rather than look into it. Zhuyin has pros and cons, the 2 biggest cons I see are 1: It wasn&#x27;t invented in mainland China and 2: even the Taiwanese view it as sort of thing a child uses (adults use full Chinese characters). But technically it has about 38 characters, although you could fit it into a qwerty style keyboard based on the assumption that there are only 21&#x2F;22 characters that can begin a word and 17 that can follow (oversimplification) so it is doable.