[knolax]

Pinyin is only phonetically regular if you don't actually speak Chinese, and therefore learn all your pronounciations from Pinyin. Even for speakers of Mandarin in Beijing it lacks a competent ability to indicate a merged 兒 at the end of a character. In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool.

Whatever success attributed to Pinyin has less to do with Pinyin and more to do with the social changes that coincided with it's introduction. Bopomofo, a more phonetically regular and easier to use system was used for decades before Pinyin and is still used in Taiwan today.

In addition, there are many adults alive today in their 60s and over who never learned any phonetic system and can read and write just fine.

People in Hong Kong also don't seem to learn any romanizatiom system for Cantonese pronounciations in school and can obviously read and write just fine.

[oefrha]

> In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool.

Since most Chinese people type Chinese using Pinyin-based input methods (not counting voice recognition and handwriting recognition as typing here, which are also pretty widely used these days), this claim is absolutely, undoubtedly, 100% false.

Edit: Somehow read “many” as “most”. Since “many” can mean anything from one thousand people out of 1.4 billion to all of them, it’s not possible to refute the claim. But the idea should be clear: forgetting Pinyin upon entering high school is not common.

[knolax]

You forget that a good number of professionals do not use phonetic input methods, and use component based ones like CangJie, Boshiamy, WuBi, Four Corners etc. Plus even phonetic input methods have "fuzzy modes". If you ever watch an experienced typer use a phonetic method you'll see that often they only enter the first letter of each character.

The fact that any number of people forget Pinyin at all demonstrates that it can't be compared to English phonics. You can't forget phonics, you can forget Pinyin.

[oefrha]

Sure, you can forget Pinyin, that doesn’t mean people do forget Pinyin, which you have provided no evidence for and doesn’t match observed reality. No convenience features in Pinyin-based input methods will help you if you actually forget the whole system. In fact, I personally know elderly people who were educated in 1930s and 40s who later learned Pinyin because it’s easier to type that way.

And yes, I’m aware of the non-phonetic input methods, and that professional typists could type faster in them. But the learning curve is way steeper (compared to basically none).

[knolax]

"忘拼音" comes up with these results

https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/652630803736726165.html

https://iask.sina.com.cn/b/12990158.html

Most of the results are actually asking what the PinYin for "忘" is so obviously enough people who know how to type the character forgot the PinYin.

For comparison, googling "forgetting how to spell" comes up with webpages about Alzheimer's and "olvidando cómo deletrear" comes up with links about dyslexia.

The learning curve for non-phonetic input methods are exaggerated. Just developing the mechanical skills to type at all takes a long time already and can be done in parallel with learning the input method. If you don't believe me go find someone who rarely uses a computer and ask them to type something in any language. The learning curve for PinYin input methods is only supposedly low because it's already taught in school. It's like saying CAD software has a low learning curve because most engineering degrees include a course in how to use it.

> I personally know elderly people who were educated in 1930s and 40s who later learned Pinyin because it’s easier to type that way.

That's your anecdota I guess. I know plenty of young people who refuse to use anything other than X non-phonetic input method and English speakers who swear by DVORAK or ortholinears or whatever.

[oefrha]

1. Some questions in this category aren't actually about forgetting the Pinyin system, but rather, Pinyin for specific characters, often because people speak dialects where the pronunciations of words and characters don't perfectly map to Pinyin in Mandarin, or at all. Fuzzy modes serve that population. (Of course, there are also commonly mispronounced characters and words.)

2. A lot of older people educated in 70s or earlier may have been taught some Pinyin, but never systematically. I know from talking to people that this is especially true in rural regions (well what can you do when the teachers don't know Pinyin). They simply never mastered Pinyin in the first place. A good part of this population didn't even go to high school, but even highly educated people in this camp can have a bit of trouble with Pinyin later, after relearning; I know a PhD born in the 60s fitting this bill, and he could still stutter on a character's Pinyin from time to time when typing.

The questions you found are very likely from this camp especially when they didn't have to type for decades until smartphones became prevalent.

Younger people from 80s and especially 90s onwards were taught Pinyin from first grade or even kindergarten before they were taught to recognize characters, then PCs and smartphones came along to reinforce the knowledge. It's pretty damn hard to forget that.

Again, of course there are "many"/"plenty" of any kind of people doing fringe stuff in a country of 1.4 billion, but presenting outliers as common or mainstream is misleading.