One thing which I would find useful is to have bopomofo offered, not as a solo option, but as a dual option for people who know pinyin but would prefer to use bopomofo. I have been using pinyin for a long time (a loooong time… more than 20 years), but I recently started to learn bopomofo and I immediately saw the improvement I saw. It would be very useful to me to see both the pinyin and bopomofo together so I would be able to transition off of one and move to the other.
“Bopomofo” as a “too hard to learn” is kinda a misnomer. Hiragana you learn in the first week of two of Japanese; having to learn bopomofo is roughly the same amount of work.
Might I ask, if you have been using pinyin for over 20 years why you are now motivated to use bopomofo (zhuyin)? Can you elaborate on the “improvement” that you saw?
Also, if it is easy to learn this transliteration method, (in one week’s time, as you say) why do you want to see it along with the pinyin?
Despite the fact that it is a new set of symbols, it codifies a lot of effort in a more rational way. I have spoken a wide range of languages which use the “English” symbols (English, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, etc.), and one which has their own (Japanese) and I have to say, Japanese sticking to Hiragana makes sense. Taiwan, as I have found, also makes sense here. The is a lot of baggage I could get rid of by jettisoning pinyin.
My wife has also turned to learning Chinese, and she, being a phonologist, immediately switched and her pronunciation increased as a result. She also speaks a few languages (English, German, Spanish) and she found that pinyin just seemed backwards for her. In her trying to teach me bopomofo, I see the simplicity of the ruleset.
While yes, hiragana only takes a week or two to learn, many people (such as myself) don’t have the time available today. Having the two available together would be beneficial.
I personally can probably use pinyin, but since I’m in Taiwan, there’s a lot of bopomofo consumers I wouldn’t be able to use. Karaoke machines being one of them, but there a lot of signs which use bopomofo as well.
Thanks for the explanations and examples. I have often wondered if the zhuyin (“bopomofo”) system would be superior for adults learning Chinese for the first time. Unlike pinyin, one does not have to “unlearn” the European pronunciations they have grown up with, and do not get “interference” from the letters that they think that they already know how to pronounce. By the way, I do not speak or read Russian but I heard once that pinyin is based on Russian letter-sound correspondence.
It has been a long time since I looked at or thought much about zhuyin, but I seem to remember that there are one or two cases where it makes a pronunciation distinction that pinyin does not. In other words, the vowel sound in two different words would be written the same way in pinyin, but be distinct in zhuyin.