Other responses have shown why characters do the job just fine, and they're not wrong, but there's something to be said for phonetic literature, which is why th

Other responses have shown why characters do the job just fine, and they're not wrong, but there's something to be said for phonetic literature, which is why there is Pinyin Literature contest [0]. See [1] for some more explanation. [0]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26503 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26503 [1]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26546 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26546