As someone who spent time learning Chinese in Beijing, this article is very confusing to me.
I learned Chinese, like pretty much every other foreigner, via pinyin pronunciation -- and it's great for language courses. And it's also great for road signs that foreigners can actually read.
But I never heard of pinyin being used by/for the Chinese themselves (except, now, as one computer typing system among many, although it still outputs in characters). All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.
And increases in literacy in China are simply due to widespread schooling and massive efforts at memorization of characters by children -- pinyin has absolutely zero value for functional literacy, because everything is still written in characters. (There are no pinyin newspapers or books I ever saw.)
EDIT: I see from comments below that pinyin is used with schoolchildren in mainland China, thanks. But I still don't see how this has helped literacy, when all reading material is still in characters.
I learned Chinese, like pretty much every other foreigner, via pinyin pronunciation -- and it's great for language courses. And it's also great for road signs that foreigners can actually read.
But I never heard of pinyin being used by/for the Chinese themselves (except, now, as one computer typing system among many, although it still outputs in characters). All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.
And increases in literacy in China are simply due to widespread schooling and massive efforts at memorization of characters by children -- pinyin has absolutely zero value for functional literacy, because everything is still written in characters. (There are no pinyin newspapers or books I ever saw.)
EDIT: I see from comments below that pinyin is used with schoolchildren in mainland China, thanks. But I still don't see how this has helped literacy, when all reading material is still in characters.