Wrong. Also, in NY, there is a state DMV, 57 county DMVs, and the NYC DMV. County DMV offices are run by their respective county clerks, though they do tie into the state computer systems. Many of them are fantastic.
I learned Chinese in Taiwan with Zhuyin, as a child. The first thing the teachers got was instruction in Zhuyin, and the way our books and teachers taught Zhuyin was by giving latin characters and English words with corresponding letters. Just looking at Zhuyin did not tell my English-trained brain I was learning new sounds from scratch.
In college I was taught Pinyin and we were given instruction on the correct pronunciation of each phonetic sound, positioning of the tongue etc., and the teacher spent time drilling us on that.
What matters is good instruction. Using Romanization doesn't encourage more correct pronunciation. Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are used for all manner of languages with completely different phonologies.
Honestly, once you know either pinyin or zhuyin, learning the other is trivial. It took under a day for me to get it 95% down and then with some regular usage it was done. But one effect was I found I had a much easier time keeping sounds straight than my fellow learners who often confused sounds that had less straight-forward mappings in the system they learned.
Learning IPA on top is an extreme but still useful third point of attack and again, it's trivial compared to the difficulty of actually learning to hear the sounds clearly. It must have been a year before I realized how different the d in pinyin and the d in English were.
Silly revisionism. You think Mao engaged in a national literacy program for the sole purpose of inculcate people with Communist propaganda? I don't think so. That's equivalent to saying Hitler built railroads solely so people could get to Nazi party gatherings and transport Jews to camps.
It's possible for Mao to simultaneously be a disastrous autocrat who committed atrocities and to have engaged in projects of national and economic development. Some of them were debacles. Others, like pinyin for Romanization and simplification of writing, were complete successes.
Do you know anything about Chinese? What "new language" are you talking about? Simplified characters and pinyin are not new languages.
The persistence of traditional characters in Hong Kong/Taiwan or diaspora doesn't say anything about the success of simplified characters, which brought literacy to over a billion in the Chinese mainland.
I have some personal experience in this matter; I do not have a natural aptitude for foreign language learning. I learned oral Mandarin as a second language as as a child. I was taught reading and writing Chinese with traditional characters and with Zhuyin/bopomofo (still used in Taiwan, at least until recently), not Romanization.
I studied Chinese in college, learning introductory written Chinese again with simplified characters and pinyin. My personal experience as a native English speaker was that pinyin and simplified characters were substantially easier to get to a functional level of literacy level.
It's not really rocket science, just from a human memory perspective, simplified characters have many fewer strokes and radicals, and many homonymous characters are united so there are fewer of them. This also makes keyboard entry somewhat faster and makes smaller characters legible on displays (or even in print).
I'm not arguing that simplified characters necessarily reduce the effort in achieving a very high level of literacy, but for basic literacy, simplified writing/spelling systems are effective.
Agreed that Pinyin is a great help for the learner.
However, have to disagree on the character simplification.
While it would sure make sense to make characters simpler, simplification really only made some characters faster to write (by hand), by reducing the number of strokes. It is very unclear whether it makes things easier to read (in print), or easier to write/remember (when you use a keyboard to type it).
On the other hand, traditional characters retain more of the etymological components which are helpful for creating mnemonic devices to more easily memorize the characters.
Would you be willing to say how long you have been learning Chinese? Just curious. I am taking classes and a lot of outside focus/study. Native English speaker too.
