Pinyin was not designed as a system for making it easier for English speakers to pronounce Chinese, but as a way for native Chinese speakers to write their own

Pinyin was not designed as a system for making it easier for English speakers to pronounce Chinese, but as a way for native Chinese speakers to write their own language. During the early years of the revolution in China, there were proposals of various levels of seriousness to ditch characters entirely in favor of a Latin script like pinyin, and this actually happened in Vietnam. Wade-Giles, an earlier system of transliterating Chinese, was designed more with English speakers in mind, but suffered from a number of problems of its own, particularly requiring apostrophes all over the place. And in Japan you can still see two competing systems duking it out, with the Japanese-for-Japanese Kunrei system ("Huzi") officially anointed as standard but in practice the Japanese-for-Americans Hepburn ("Fuji") being far more common.