[faitswulff]

Pinyin is widely used, but pinyin’s primacy is oversold. Chinese texts start with teaching Chinese characters - many are recognizable to children from daily exposure to begin with, so they don’t need the pinyin. Pinyin only comes in when the character is genuinely unknown.

[RationPhantoms]

I think computer/smartphone usage has been changing that latent space for quite some time. People have been talking about "character amnesia" since 2010.

[faitswulff]

Sort of, but the amnesia typically applies to writing characters, rather than reading them.

[nneonneo]

Pinyin is also the main way people input Chinese into computers, so it's rather important in that regard.

[reuven]

I've been taking Chinese lessons for a number of years, and my teacher described her son as learning characters via pinyin. But it's quite possible (even likely) that the common ones don't require pinyin, and/or that I misunderstood how it's used. Nevertheless, even if I pushed the analogy a bit, I still think this might happen as a bridge between learning to code and agentic coding.