(Part 2) Top products from r/Chinese

So, I too have had this debate many times, and I am heartened every time someone steps up in support of character based writing like Hanzi. My honest attitude toward this is "I want to believe". I want to believe that there is equal merit to Hanzi as letter-based phonetic writing like romanized, cyrillic, etc. But all the evidence seems to point to the contrary.

Some rebuttals to your points:

>I imagine there's also been an increase in the number of English speakers who have problems remembering the spelling for words where the pronunciation is not as obvious when read.

Let's assume this is the case. I mean, there's some evidence that it isn't the case but let's assume it is. There's a categorical difference between forgetting the "I before E, except after C" rule, or forgetting whether you need an 'e', an 'i', or an 'a' in words like "definitely", "separate", and "necessary" and fundamentally forgetting that a letter existed or how to handwrite a letter.

In this clip, there's a gentleman who "struggles with the character for 'thumb'." The above words are 3 and 4 syllables long but 拇指 (Mǔzhǐ) is only 2 syllables and he got half the word wrong. This is a far cry from simply mixing up the order of two letters like writing "beleive" instead of "believe". In other words, here's an article from just 2017 saying "Character amnesia has become more and more common...". Show me the article that says there's currently an epidemic of otherwise literate adults forgetting how to write basic words in English.

>The writing system survived for thousands of years because it was effective.

I mean, there's "effective" and there's "optimal", right? The Mayan civilization lasted for about 3000 years and had a glyph based writing system. Would you seriously advocate that this is an optimal system of writing? Probably not, right? So I think this argument is true but a little misleading, depending on what exactly you mean by "effective". Then again, "effective" is defined as "producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect". Was the "desired effect" of the language for its users to begin forgetting its own writing system?

>(ie, the use of physician, medic, and doctor for medical personnel), it gets a lot harder for the reader to guess what's being referred to.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Yeah, those are three different words with three different definitions and they might be industry-specific. But it's not about it being "harder" for a reader to understand the difference. When a reader comes across a word, they either know what the definition is or not. If it's a real word then then the burden is on the reader to go to a dictionary and look up what the word is. It's also the writers job to try to make their vernacular and syntax as clear as possible.

>Furthermore, they take up little room on the page

Ehhhhh, again, technically true, but so what? It's not even that big of a difference. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in English is 309 pages while in Chinese it's 242. This is not that much value-added.

Arguing that Hanzi has some benefits over romanization is like arguing that chopsticks has merit over the fork (another mistake in efficiency I think the East made). You're essentially saying "Sure, forks are ok, but look! you can't twirl a fork around like this can you?" It just strikes me as a pride thing.

Again! I'm a big fan of the language. I think there are some interesting logical ambiguities that exist in English that don't in Mandarin. For example, there's this joke in English — Question: "What did the logician say when his wife handed him their newborn and asked if it's a boy or a girl", Answer: "Yes" — Well, in Mandarin, since you specify Yes/No questions with the 'ma' particle, you avoid the ambiguity.

Do yourself a favor and start learning the characters in parallel. The reasons for this have been reiterated time and time again, and you can find plenty of articles discussing it on google. Succinctly:

• Chinese has tons of homophones (words that sound exactly the same). Learning the characters will help you separate them.
  
• Characters contain components that often reveal parts of the meaning or sound, and will help you remember the word. Learning the sound patterns alone is usually harder in the long run.
  
• You won't be able to use Chinese-English dictionaries, or comprehensive Chinese-Chinese dictionaries. The people who need dictionaries the most are precisely learners of Chinese.
  
• You will get access to more learning materials. Material for pinyin learners is limited to a few books for beginners. After that you are on your own, and will find that there is nothing that will take you to the next level unless you go back and learn to read (which is tedious and much more time consuming than learning to read from the start). Your only options will be to try to learn the language by listening to others or to TV/radio. If you are a 3 year old child, your brain is wired to do that, but as an adult learner you will consciously have to decipher everything. That will be hampered by all the dialectical differences and idiosyncrasies of individual speakers. The only way you have to find out if the person on TV said zhi-shao, shi-zhao, si-chao... might be to look at the subtitles and check the dictionary, and if you can't read that will not be possible.
  
  
  As for where to start: Amazon has a great selection of teach-yourself books. Just stay away from the ones that promise you "fluency in 10 minutes a day" (they lie) and especially programs like Rosetta Stone which try to make too much of a game out of the learning process, do not focus on teaching you semantic content in context and have no grammatical content. They are the most ineffective learning methods out there. This is a good starting point that will have you conversing from lesson 1.

For something to browse and pick up a few phrases from, I'd recommend Niubi!: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School. You can find a PDF online if you're into that. It has characters, pinyin, and a solid explanation with examples for each entry.