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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

That (nice!) article gives 9 reasons. Only 6 of them are applicable in 2015.

#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops.

#5 is no longer true, as dictionaries are now on Pleco. Yes, I found it hard to look up words in a paper dictionary when I started learning. But, for today's learners, their first dictionary is Pleco on iOS/Android, and this pain is gone.

#7 is a weird one. You only need one romanization method (Pinyin) to learn Chinese, or to look up the standard (Mandarin) pronunciation of a new character. When would I ever need to use or read Wade-Giles, or any other romanization method, unless I'm reading the romanized version of a Taiwan/HK person's surname?

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>#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops.

First of all, this isn't true. Every convenience store in China sells pens. Billions of pens are sold per year in China. Even at the tech company where I worked in China, everyone had a pen or pencil and some wrote notes with them. People often used markers and wrote things on whiteboards, too. It was pretty much the same in that sense as English speaking places.

Secondly, the main point in #3 wasn't about writing. It was about learning. If you see a few taquerias in Mexico with "Taqueria" written in the sign, you'll learn a new word and how to pronounce it. You might later realize you've been hearing the word "taqueria" in a radio commercial and suddenly understand more of it. In China, you could enter a post office, see 郵局 written on it and hear the word 郵局 in conversation every day for a month and still not understand what it is people are saying. That is why the writing system slows learners down, even if comprehension is their goal.

You're right, especially about the reinforcement bit.

There are some characters that I can recognise, because I've seen them often enough on Taobao, but don't come up in every day conversation. So, I don't know how to pronounce them, and wouldn't recognise them if someone said them out loud.

Wade-Giles is used very, very widely in English-language historical writing. Particularly anything that is more than about twenty years old. So you have to know what the names of people and places are in both Pinyin and Wade-Giles, and often enough in whatever less-standard romanization the author happened to use.

Regarding #3, there are efforts in China to prevent "character amnesia" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473

People write with pens often. Although characters per second is much faster on a computer, there's less total overhead to writing with pen and paper in many situations.

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