Also, I would say that yes, pinyin did help me learn the language, and was especially important in providing a phonetic standard for characters.
Taiwan is in a bit of a confusing place right now with phonetic alphabets for Mandarin. Here's my understanding - I'll use the abbreviations "WG" for Wade-Giles and "HP" for "Hanyu-Pinyin".
- They traditionally used Wade-Giles to romanise things for international consumption. ie Taipei (HP: Taibei), Taichung (HP: Taizhong), Kaohsiung (HP: Gaoxiong) etc.
- They officially switched to Hanyu Pinyin as their official romanisation about 10 years ago, but it seems to only have taken place on a very low scale. Ie the Da'An (WG: Ta'an) distrct in Taipei, or Wuri (WG: Wujih) in Taichung. With regards to people - the second president of the ROC-On-Taiwan is known in English by his WG name Chiang Ching-kuo (HP: Jiang Jing-Guo), while the current president is knowing exclusively by her HP name Tsai Ing-Wen (WG: Zai Ying-Wen). You can see this confusion manifest itself today - we still eat "Peking Duck" (WG), but we refer to the city as "Beijing" (HP).
- Some places in Taiwan are romanized with neither system, like Keelung, which seems to be some ad-hoc romanisation of Taiwanese Hokkien (another Chinese language entirely) that took root in the 19th century. Though interestingly enough, in the most common Taiwanese Hokkien romanisation system it would be "Kelang".
- In terms of education for locals, it's 100% Bopomofo as far as I can tell. I've also yet to meet a Taiwanese person who uses anything other than Bopomofo for input on their phones and computers. Apple atually added an extra tone mark to their Bopomofo IME (high tone is indicated by no tone mark, traditionally), which some Taiwanese people now seem to think is actually part of the alphabet!
- And lastly, in terms of education for foreigners, it seems to be a hugely mixed bag. Many foreigners now demand the use of Pinyin because it uses the Latin alphabet and it's more comfortable for them. A lot of places will still expect you to learn Bopomofo (which IMO has a lot of advantages - it's only 37 characters, stops you thinking in terms of your native pronounciation, and the IMEs for it are way better because they let you filter characters by tone). AFAIK Wade-Giles is dead for teaching, but one famous Taiwanese book for teaching Mandarin I used uses all three phonetic alphabets - WG, HP and Bopomofo, which was quite distracting!
Full disclaimer - my Mandarin is rudimentary and I am not Taiwanese.
To add to the confusion, Taiwan seems to have had their own adapation of wade-giles between 2002-2008 called Tongyong Pinyin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyong_Pinyin
The moral of the story is - when asking for directions in Taiwan, don't rely on the street signs much for pronunciation :D
As far as I know, the rule of thumb is that exchange students are taught using Pinyin, and full-time students use Bopomofo. Teaching materials usually have both, anyway, so I don't think it's a big deal.
> I've also yet to meet a Taiwanese person who uses anything other than Bopomofo for input on their phones and computers.
I've seen older people use the handwriting IME on iOS. You can tell when you see stray simplified characters or other variants that can't be produced with Bopomofo :)
- In Taiwan, it's officially using TP during 2002~2008, the reason was to unify romanize/pinyin system for Mandarin/Taiwanese Hokkien/Taiwanese Hakka.
- It was then switched to HP at 2008 for English-friendlier environment.
- It is 100% Bopomofo in education. For most Taiwanese people we use Bopomofo as computer input method, but there are alternatives like Cangjie (based on how we write characters), Ziran (means natural literally, which is a mix of Cangjie and Bopomofo plus some heuristic). The alternatives are invented because there are too many characters sharing the same Bopomofo, you still have to choose characters after typed Bopomofo. Most alternatives have low market share in general public, but high market share in typing heavy jobs.
- Because WG was officially translation rule of ministry of foreign affairs before 2002 and they only recommend instead of forcing switch to TP/HP, so name of most city and people are still based on WG. So does those widespread words (like, Peking Duck).