Fair enough, why would you put your time and effort into learning a completely different input system, when we already have Pinyin?
Here are a few reasons for you:
1. Tones.
You can type them. And that’s why I personally went for Bopomofo. Back when I was using Pinyin I would forget the tones all the time, now I force myself to always type them and they are in my head.
2. Bopomofo makes more sense phonetically.
I remember in the beginning of my learning Chinese journey I learnt the word for group – 群 and because its Pinyin is qún I would always say q yu n while getting confused why it sounds off. But after I learnt bopomofo I’ve realised that it is actually q ü en ㄑㄩㄣˊ and that’s how it is pronounced, all makes sense. Why did Pinyin remove that e? Because Pinyin is a shortcut.
Or yet another example I remember when I was learning numbers I got so confused why is 六 liù sounds like? Why couldn’t they just write leo in this case? Bopomofo explains it well, there it’s ㄌㄧㄡˋ liou which indeed reminds of leo when you say it fast. In Pinyin they merely removed “o”. And then there is hui (e.g. 會, hùi) which literally means dick in Russian but actually the way you say it does not sound like that at all, in Zhuyin it is spelled as ㄏㄨㄟˋ h u ei – exactly the way you’re supposed to pronounce it.
Then also in Pinyin ㄜ and ㄝ are merged into just one letter e, which might be confusing for beginners because they are two totally different sounds. Even worse, ㄖ and ㄦ are merged into “r”. I’ve seen so many foreigners who were misled by it because they perceived ㄖ as English r.
A fair question would be why are Pinyin spellings so inaccurate? Because Pinyin was not designed to be easy to learn for foreigners, but rather intended as a romanisation system which would replace Chinese characters entirely. They only wanted to find a way to write Chinese with a limited alphabet of 26 letters, so a lot of compromises we made. This has a negative impact on Chinese people too, because a lot of people would intuitively pronounce English as Pinyin.
3. Bopomofo looks badass
I think no one is going to argue that Pinyin, given that it’s just your typical Roman letters, looks kinda boring. But when you look at Bopomofo, especially for the first time, it is amazing, it truly looks like an alien language.
Ready to start?
If that was convincing enough for you, navigate to the next chapter