What are some reasons why some people believe that pinyin in Mandarin is not useful?
The above was a question on Quora.
Jojo Dennis Lee answered as below:
Pinyin is hard to read and write specially for English and Spanish speaking people. This is because the letters that are used are pronounced differently. For example, 北京 which was originally named in English as Peking and later changed to Beijing to adopt to Pinyin. But the pronunciation is actually “Pei Ching” or “Pay Tsing”. Another example is 道 (Dào in Pinyin) which means road but is actually pronounced as Tao. There are no B, D, G, J, V, X, Z sounds in Mandarin.
Pinyin was designed for people in China who don’t speak English. But for people who already know English, it is confusing and will mispronounce it.
