I know very little Russian and can’t say for certain, but I think Russian is similar to English in these consonants. I should make it clear I don’t think Pinyi

I know very little Russian and can’t say for certain, but I think Russian is similar to English in these consonants. I should make it clear I don’t think Pinyin is a bad system, only that it does not map sounds to European languages well. And that is fine, as least for its original purpose. Contrary to common belief, Pinyin was not developed to better educate illiterate people (this does not even make sense if you think carefully), but as the next step after letter simplification (what we know as Simplified Chinese today) towards Chinese Romanisation. The goal was not to represent sounds of Chinese characters, but to outright replace them. The actual reason behind using (for example) b and p instead of p and p' is exactly this—they are optimising for ease to write, not sound accuracy. And in regard to making it easy for people not prolific with Chinese letters to read, be them foreigners or simply illiterate, a phonetic transcription system is indeed important. But although having a standard phonetic transcription is key to the jump in literacy in China, I would argue the same can be achieved with any decent system, and a few of them are already around by the time they started working on Pinyin. All in all, while Pinyin is good for its original purpose, it achieved its current status not because of academical reasons, but political ones. The Chinese Communists government had always have a habit ignoring existing systems and inventing their own. :p