You're right, I should not equate English with pinyin. I think however, pinyin as the solution is more indicative of how Western focused (especially with the pr

You're right, I should not equate English with pinyin. I think however, pinyin as the solution is more indicative of how Western focused (especially with the proliferation of English) the entire world is. Or at least specifically with this author's viewpoint. I have learned pinyin, and basically it is the easiest way to input onto a US-English keyboard (as he says), but you essentially lose all underlying meaning of the character's history if you're learning Chinese based off pinyin. Essentially the same as removing all meaning of what a prefix, suffix and root of a word is in English. For example: "Imperialism": I am sure you can tell me that the suffix is ("-ism") and what it's meaning is ("belief in"/advocacy) and you can probably tell me the origins/meanings of "Imperial" (empire) and so if you put those two words together an English speaking person would understand "Imperialism" as advocacy of an empire. But what is "Imperialism" in English if it is spelled "diguozhuyi"? That is what you lose when you switch to a pure romanization. And writing this post to you know makes me realize what I hate so much about the article. He throws away any meaning Chinese characters have for the sake of simplicity for his self benefit. Taiwan has an alphabet like equivalent called "zhuyin" or bopomofo after the first 4 characters. The author never mentions this because I'm guessing he just asked some colleague in China rather than look into it. Zhuyin has pros and cons, the 2 biggest cons I see are 1: It wasn't invented in mainland China and 2: even the Taiwanese view it as sort of thing a child uses (adults use full Chinese characters). But technically it has about 38 characters, although you could fit it into a qwerty style keyboard based on the assumption that there are only 21/22 characters that can begin a word and 17 that can follow (oversimplification) so it is doable.