“Solar’s secret (other than apparently practising 4 hours every day) is, of course, bypassing characters altogether. On this Weibo post (3rd image [click to open and enlarge]) she reveals that she’s been learning Mandarin purely using Pinyin all this time” languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69818

“The front lawn was only invented around the time of Columbus. The idea was to demonstrate that you had time and money to waste. …a sign of status and luxury.” seths.blog/2025/06/stat.... Chinese characters are the front lawns of writing—nonfunctional complexity as status symbol.

“Many of these so-called Chinese ‘dialects’ are in fact, different languages.” —David Moser (@davidmoserbeijing.bsky.social), in his book _A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language_ www.amazon.com/Billion-Voic...

“There’s always somebody who doesn’t want someone to have what they have because they don’t think they deserve it.” kottke.org/25/05/i-want... E.g., many who have spent a long time learning Chinese characters don’t want people to be able to read & write Mandarin with _Pīnyīn_.

Pīnyīn Typist runs on Apple Silicon Macs. To run it at native resolution (so that the text, etc. doesn't look abnormally small), click the "Window" menu and choose "Zoom".

The map is not the territory; The characters are not the language. The Mandarin language is actually the SPEECH. (Many languages don't even *have* a writing system.) The Chinese characters are just one possible way to record Mandarin speech. _Pīnyīn_ is another, simpler way.

"Uncomfortable ideas The ideas aren't uncomfortable, we are. You don't have to like the weather to acknowledge that it's raining." https://seths.blog/2025/04/uncomfortable-ideas/

“The truth of a great modern professional’s tool: it’s complicated for a reason.” —Seth Godin seths.blog/2025/04/the-... Chinese characters are an old tradition that most Chinese people are too proud and apathetic to move on from—bad reason, so they’re not modern, and not great.

⠪⠆ is the (Mainland) Chinese Braille representation of ài (love 爱 愛) ⠪ corresponds to “ai” in _Pīnyīn_, and ⠆ corresponds to 4th tone. Blind Mandarin-speaking people need to read and write about love too!

"Ài" is how Pīnyīn represents "love". It doesn't play the games the characters play—it helps you actually say "I love you" ("Wǒ ài nǐ"). ❤️

"爱" is the Simplified Chinese character for "love". It's simpler, but omits the "heart" radical ("心"), and has been "friend" ("友")-zoned. 💔

"愛" is the Traditional Chinese character for "love". It appropriately has the "heart" radical ("心") in it, but it's quite…complicated. 😓

Many claim that _Pīnyīn_ shouldn't be used as a writing system because characters are required to avoid confusion from all the homophones (different words that sound the same) in Mandarin. If that's true, then people shouldn't SPEAK Mandarin either! But many do, and it's fine. #Pinyin

Being more complicated and more traditional does not make a system better—being BETTER makes it better. _Pīnyīn_ is an objectively better system than Chinese characters in significant ways. While still functioning as a full writing system for Mandarin, _Pīnyīn_ is much simpler and more consistent.

“It is relatively easy for a speaker of Taiwanese to become literate in roman letters, not at all so in characters.” —Prof. Victor Mair languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68565 Of course, when it comes to Mandarin, the same is true for _Pīnyīn_. Characters are just hard! Alphabets are just easier.

"Is Taishanese Cantonese? "Legally, in Canada, no. "Much less, is Cantonese Mandarin? Is Taiwanese Mandarin? "Legally / linguistically, in a fair and impartial world court, no." —Professor Victor Mair

“Never, never, never in this office say, ‘But we’ve always done it that way.’” —Admiral Grace Hopper, computer programming pioneer Re writing Mandarin with Chinese characters, many say, “But we’ve always done it that way.” However, as _Lǔ Xùn_ asked, does that make it right?

“The fact that there has not been another [Chinese characters] spelling reform since the third century B. C. goes far to explain why the phonetic elements do such a poor job of representing present-day pronunciation.” —John DeFrancis, _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ #ChineseLangFactFantasy

Sure, work hard and learn all the Chinese characters you can. (It’s not humanly possible to learn and remember all of them.) Work SMART too, though—use _Pīnyīn_ to quickly and easily read and write ANYTHING in Mandarin. While others are mired in tradition, you’ll get ahead.

To those who have grown used to the inconsistencies and vagaries of English spelling and of Chinese characters, the simplicity and consistency of _Pīnyīn_ may feel strange, and maybe boring. However, when you have things to do, and you just want things to work, boring is good.

By setting a low bar for literacy, China downplays how serious a problem illiteracy still is there. Even accepting China’s claimed literacy rate, the number of illiterate people there almost equals the entire population of Canada. Characters are hard; _Pīnyīn_ is easy and works.

China relegating _Pīnyīn_ to being just a pronunciation aid for characters is like a company hiring a talented A player executive and then making that person just get coffee for the CEO, because the established power base’s top priority is to preserve itself—B players in action.

“A players hire A players…B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, …C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve [Jobs] called ‘the bozo explosion’” _Pīnyīn_ was Plan A, but China unfortunately let the B players have their way.

“‘Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,’ said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology…‘Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.’” languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67023