WHY ALPHABETIZATION?

There are two possible goals for the alphabetization （拼音化）of Chinese, one modest and one more drastic.

The more drastic goal is to replace the current non-alphabetic writing system with a totally new, alphabetic orthography. The modest goal is to provide a better system to indicate the sound of Chinese for the purpose of learning the language.

The non-alphabetic writing system of Chinese has done wonders for maintaining cohesiveness among the diverse Chinese people speaking different languages and for the transmission of cultural information about an ancient civilization, information that tends to get lost in writing systems that represent sound only. Despite all that, the Chinese writing system is harder to learn and harder to use than alphabetic writing systems. The major sources of difficulty are the huge number of characters and the irregularities in the representation of meanings and sounds. Both of these difficulties require a tremendous amount of mechanical memorization in the process of learning the characters. The non-alphabetic writing system also presents special problems for computer technology and communication.

Chinese characters are also not very good for indicating pronunciation. The ‘homophonous mutual gloss’ (音同、读若、直音) method that the ancients use, i.e., indicating the pronunciation of an unknown character with a known character with the same pronunciation is obviously fraught with problems. The method assumes that you already know some characters, which may not be true for beginners. The set of known characters required also needs to be very large, as there are hundreds of distinct syllables in Chinese (over 1000 in Mandarin, many more in ancient times since there were more tones and more complex syllable structure then). Different people also may have used different sets of known characters to indicate pronunciation. What if the character you use is not in my set of known characters?

The Fanqie（反切）method, revolutionary as it was for its day, did not eliminate either of these problems. The use of fanqie still presupposed prior knowledge of characters. It is true that fewer characters were needed with Fanqie than with the earlier ‘mutual gloss’ method. If we use Mandarin as the basis for calculation, we need at least 21 characters for the initials and 35 (final) x 4 (tones) characters for finals with tones. So there have to be at least 161 characters to cover all sounds. With the inconsistency in fanqie usage, the actual number of fanqie characters used would have been much larger.

Using an independent alphabetic system to indicate pronunciation solves both the problem of circularity inherent in any system that uses mutual definition (mono-lingual dictionaries are good examples of that) and the necessity of a large number of elements. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. And you don’t need to know any character to be able to get the pronunciation of a character.