[Analemma_]

Historically, there have been repeated attempts in both China and Japan to replace Chinese characters with a phonetic system (and Korea and Vietnam actually went through with it). These efforts haven't panned out, but it's demonstrably not the case that only ignorant émigrés think a phonetic system would be better.

[joe_the_user]

Well, the history of Hangul shows that the difficulty of phoneticizing a language is on the first problem in the disseminating a phonetic alphabet.

"Hangul faced opposition by the literary elite, such as Choe Manri and other Korean Confucian scholars in the 1440s, who believed hanja to be the only legitimate writing system, and perhaps saw Hangul as a threat to their status.[9] However, it entered popular culture as Sejong had intended, being used especially by women and writers of popular fiction.[15] It was effective enough at disseminating information among the uneducated that Yeonsangun, the paranoid tenth king, forbade the study or use of Hangul and banned Hangul documents in 1504,[16] and King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of Eonmun (언문청 諺文廳, governmental institution related to Hangul research) in 1506."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#History

[lstyls]

Pinyin Chinese is an international standard and keyboards would be basically unusable for writing Chinese characters without it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin.

[MagnumOpus]

> Pinyin Chinese is an international standard

A national standard, at best (in the PRC). In Taiwan, Zhuyin (Bopomofo) is universal, taught in schools and found on laptop keyboards, and romanisations are mostly following Wade-Giles rules. In Hongkong, Eitel romanisation is used even though their new commie overlords are forcing pinyin and yale canto down their kids' throats.

[lstyls]

ISO and United Nations adoption don't qualify Pinyin as an international standard?

Using Taiwan as an example isn't really relevant given that it's majority Cantonese speaking, and Cantonese is a completely different spoken language than Mandarin.

Edit: I'm a clown. I was confusing traditional Chinese with Cantonese. Not the same thing.

[gommm]

Hong Kong is majority Cantonese speaking. Taiwan is not, it's Mandarin (and to a lesser extent Hokkien and Hakka but most young people prefer to speak Mandarin).

[lstyls]

You're right, edited my original comment to correct. Thanks.

[dnautics]

Are you sure Taiwan is mostly cantonese?

[lstyls]

You're right it's not. I was confusing it with traditional vs simplified Chinese. Thanks for the correction.

[jwong_]

Besides Pinyin, there is Cangjie, Q9, Dayi, etc. Plenty of other input methods are well in use. Though Pinyin is most widespread due to it being the way most kids are taught Mandarine.

[kmicklas]

There's lots of alternatives to Pinyin, some based on the Latin alphabet, others not like Bopomofo.

[jwong_]

Not to mention any of the shape based methods like congkit

[douche]

Which is supremely confusing as a student of history of that region of the world. Trying to figure out whether a book or article used Pinyin or Wade-Giles, one of the other competing systems, a mishmash of several, or (especially in older sources) made up their own method, made it very interesting trying to keep track of where things were happening and who was doing them.

[dnautics]

I don't think there was ever a 'solid attempt' in Japanese to do a strictly phonetic system. The language has such a high degree of homophony that assigning chinese characters in the written system does allow some level of useful disambiguation.

It gets really complicated with japanese - there's a many-to-many-to-many <symbolic>-<phonetic>-<semantic> relationship... One character can have many different readings and due to the homophony, any given reading can have divergent meanings. For example - HASHI can mean bridge, "side of something", or chopsticks - and the character for "bridge" can also be read "kyo" depending on the context.

I imagine chinese is much easier for a japanese native speaker to learn than vice versa for those reasons (since often some of the phonetic forms "on-yomi" of the characters are directly borrowed - with some inflective changes).