I think there's a huge trend of people inventing their own informal romanizations even when there is already a reasonable and standard scholarly version. https

I think there's a huge trend of people inventing their own informal romanizations even when there is already a reasonable and standard scholarly version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Code - but people (including Greek speakers) still transliterate Greek to English-style, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeklish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeklish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Hebrew#Comparative_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Hebrew#Compara... - see "Common Israeli" (despite the existence of scholarly options like SBL, and the fact that the informal transliterations conflate tons of different things that are spelled differently but pronounced alike in modern Israeli Hebrew) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Arabic#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Arabic#Compari... - as with Hebrew, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet versions will also sometimes elide differences that are preserved in writing in Arabic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin - but people (including some Chinese speakers) sometimes still transliterate Chinese to English-style (and often omit the tones) My impression is that, of these, native speakers of the mentioned languages are most familiar with Pinyin, probably because it's officially taught and tested in school in many Chinese-speaking countries. I don't think romanization methods for the other languages are taught in school and that might help account for why many people often don't know them, or at least don't know them in detail.