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[Roger]

Of course, we do not need phonetic symbols when learning our first language, but we do when acquiring a second tongue. Having said this, I must add that in my college days when I was studying 4 languages we never used the international symbols - in contrast with CHinese students who know them pretty well!

Each language has a number of phonemes unique to it - think of Xhosa and its click sounds (represented in Roman letters with an 'X', think of the German umlauts, the French nasals or the English 'TH' sound (English seems to share it with Catalan or Spanish though the latter represents this sound with the letter 'c').
Letters are conventions to denote a particular way of producing a sound but phonemes are rigidly set phonological carriers destined to convey sounds that recombine to meaningful words in the mind of the hearer.
The first sounds we learn to produce we learn from our mother - hence mother tongue. Usually our mother speaks the language of the community of which she is a member; thus our first tongue gets "wired" itno our nervous system. It explains why the same language comes in a variety of different accents: we recognise someone who grew up in the same neck of the country where we lived in our childhood; it's always others who speak "with an accent".
When someone speaks your language as his second tongue his accent is most probably more or less heavily influenced by his mother tongue - that's why Chinese students struggle to produce the correct 'TH' sound.
In Chinese classes you will be subjected to long and repetitive pronunciation drills to get your tongue around the 400 or so recurrent syllables. You will note that the 'R' sound is rare and represents a whole syllable on its own (and Chinese dialects often do without it).
Native Chinese speakers also don't naturally differentiate between long and short vowels ("sheep" versus "ship").
While Chinese-style pronunciation drills for English sounds would take much longer (since English has unlimited numbers of potential phonemic combinations) I think it would be useful to expose Chinese tongues to some exercises that drill English peculiarities; these could include all the prefixes and affixes.

Meanwhile, if any Mandarin dictionary with a phonetic transliteration (beyond the romanised version called pinyin) hits the market, let me know...

[Fortigurn]

[Shan-Shan]

[quote="Fortigurn"]
The smart move of course would be to abandon Chinese characters altogether, and switch to a Romanisation system like Hanyu Pinyin.[/quote][quote]


This might not affect comprehension of very elementary texts. But if something such as the newspaper, for example, or more "literary" texts abandoned Chinese characters, it would lead to a lot of confusion. There are just too many homonyms in Chinese (see how many "yi"s there are). Without Chinese characters, ambiguity would be a major problem in many texts. I know for myself when reading messages in pinyin, I need more time than when reading in Chinese. With Chinese characters, one can sometimes just "glance", and get the gist before "reading"; with pinyin, I, at least, need to spend more time sounding out the sentence, hearing it in my head, and then begin putting some meaning together. Chinese characters are rich in visual, as well as phonetic, clues. Pinyin, however, lacks the former. Even Korean, which has done away with many Chinese characters in most types of text, includes "hanja" in brackets time to time to help clarify possible misreadings that might arise with only the hangeul (Korean characters) present.

Doing away with Chinese characters in Chinese would be like using IPA to replace English spelling in English. When encountering a new word, we wouldn't be able to use any "roots" included in the word to help us grasp the meaning. There would only be sounds, and these clues don't seem as helpful as etymological ones.




[/quote]

[Fortigurn]

[Shan-Shan]

[quote="FortigurnWe manage with countless homonyms in English, and since characters don't tell you what tone you need to use (you need to get that from context), I don't see much difference with pinyin. Use context, that's what you have to do with characters anyway.

I mean, do you really rely on the roots that much? People don't rely on roots when they read English, especially because the root word fallacy is a terrible danger when you read English.[/quote]

I think you've made some sweeping statements that need to be reeled in.

The number of homonyms in Chinese is far more than those in English. With only pinyin to rely on, especially in texts aside from Learning Chinese textbooks, context might not be enough. Try reading 红楼梦 in pinyin: I seriously doubt that everything would be as clear as it is in Chinese characters (and even then, given the difficulty of the text, the meaning isn't always clear cut). I've asked Chinese what they feel about reading pinyin: most say it gives them a headache.

Tones are also mutable depending on the speakers. For example, in Tianjin many people change "the correct" tones to the fourth tone. Also, many speakers wouldn't recognize pinyin because what they speak isn't 普通话. However, when they write the characters, everyone would understand their meaning (do you think someone in guangdong would be able to make sense of a story written in pinyin? or even someone in Sichuan? or if 李白 had a used a hypothetical system of phonetic symbols that we could pronounce today his poetry would be understandable in the slightest?). The "pinyin" behind the characters is standard in a dictionary, but not so standard with what people actually speak. One person in a small town in the north-east might read 吃　as "ci" whereas a student of Chinese would of course say "chi". Were you to only use pinyin in your writing, which one should you choose? Be a hardnosed Perscriptivist, and only make your writing accessible to foreign students, and force everyone in the country to speak and write "standard" Chinese, or a more modern Descriptivist, and write what Chinese people actually say (because characters can have a multiple number of pronunciations given the reader. A shandong friend of mine pronounces "人" like something between ren and zen? Would you write "r(z)en" for him? Or demand that he speak like foreign students in Beijing's classrooms, that is, speak and write using "standard pinyin" Chinese?

Pinyin is only a tool to help young learners and students learn the pronunciation of the characters, as well as inform native speakers the pronunciation of more obscure characters. Getting rid of characters all together would make the literary history of the country inaccessible (which could be one reason why Mao toyed with the idea of only having pinyin taught in schools), and cause huge breakdowns in communication when one person's pronunciation of a word, and thus pinyin representation, is different from another's.

Not everyone in China speaks standard Chinese. By only using pinyin, one would have to make several versions of a text to ensure that speakers of non-standard Chinese (which is the huge bulk of the country) have an equal chance to access the work.

Sometimes, I do rely on roots when reading English. Should I encounter a Greek or Latinate word that I'm not familiar with, I can look at the root, and get a good idea, along with contextual help, of what the word means. I also do the same when reading Chinese. Those radicals are a bigger benefit than pinyin! Pinyin might tell me how the word is pronounced, but it does little to render meaning clear. Also, the more Chinese characters you learn, the more patterns you will discover in the phonetic component that exists in many characters. These are quite helpful, and save time on looking up radicals, then characters, in the dictionary.



Finally, as a test to your theory, an hour ago I gave a short story I wrote in Chinese to my roommate. After your initial message, I rewrote it in pinyin. My roommate took ages to get through it. Then I have him the original. Of course he still had problems (given my grammar and vocabulary mistakes), but in the end the "chinese character" version was a lot more comprehendible, and took less time to read.

I suggest you try duplicating the experiment with a Chinese acquaintance, and see how he/she responds.