In my opinion, it’s useless.
Chinese is fundamentally not a phonetic language.
What’s called “Hanyu Pinyin,” to me, is a scam.
I see Chinese as a language of Yin and Yang, a language rooted in the Bagua (Eight Trigrams).
Pronunciation can be understood as a combination of Yin and Yang, and then we have the four tones.
In fact, the four tones are written exactly like that: yinping (陰平), yangping (陽平), shangsheng (上聲), and qusheng (去聲)
(There’s also rusheng (入聲), which has largely disappeared from modern Mandarin, but is still preserved in some dialects. For example, I can pronounce rusheng very easily—because it’s part of my native tongue.)
Isn’t this the very foundation of Chinese philosophy?
“From Taiji comes the Two Forms, from the Two Forms come the Four Phenomena…”
Chinese already existed thousands of years before the modern English alphabet was born.
So why does Chinese need the English alphabet to express its pronunciation?
Frankly, I think it doesn’t.
I’m a science student, and I don’t know much about linguistics.
But in the college entrance exams, I got the highest score in Chinese in the entire province—nearly a perfect score.
I never liked studying Hanyu Pinyin.
Just memorizing Guwen Guanzhi (《古文观止》) and Lì Wēng Duì Yùn (《笠翁对韵》) is far more effective than any pinyin system.
Chinese allows us to simulate how people spoke 100, 400, 1000, 2000, or even 3000 years ago—
just through written characters.
Of course, the pronunciation from 400 years ago already sounds a bit strange to me (though reading texts from that time is easy—I could do it at age eight).
The pronunciation from 1000 years ago is quite hard to grasp (though reading it is still easy).
The pronunciation from 2000 years ago—basically unintelligible (and reading the texts becomes difficult too).
The pronunciation from 3000 years ago—completely incomprehensible, and the written language is nearly unreadable.
But interestingly, many of the characters are so simple that even a modern primary schooler would recognize them.