[carlmr]

I think if Mandatin started using pinyin or it could start dominating. The language itself isn't that much more difficult than other languages. You can get used to tones, too. The grammar is actually simpler than in English.

But the sheer number of characters to rote memorize makes it way too inefficient to learn for foreigners, and arguably even for natives, that I don't see it becoming a world language.

There's always the argument that pinyin isn't enough, that the characters are essentially useful. Which I think Vietnamese, which used to be based on the same writing system and is also tonal, proves wrong.

If you can't communicate with pinyin you can't communicate with the language, since it almost perfectly models the sounds.

[adelie]

> If you can't communicate with pinyin you can't communicate with the language, since it almost perfectly models the sounds.

hm, i'd say it's a bit more complicated than that. written and literary chinese has a different (often more concise) style than conversational chinese because certain things that would be ambiguous spoken aren't that way when written. similarly, japanese has a perfectly functional syllabary (hiragana), but people will use kanji anyways because it's a lot easier to parse at a glance.

[seanmcdirmid]

Chinese characters are used phonetically for a lot of minority (non-Chinese) languages in China. Which I don’t really get, but there it is. I guess there is legacy to consider, as the use of Chinese in writing systems predate pinyin, and there is no pressure to change.