Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks.
And even ignoring the tones, how many foreigners can pronounce pinyin correctly? It takes a very different approach to representing non-Latin vowel sounds with Latin characters than English does, there's 'c' being pronounced 'ts', etc.
"c" being pronounced as "ts" would be familiar to most people from Central or Eastern Europe, for example. Even coming from English, "c" can often mean "s" which is at least similar.
I'd say that the most unusual pinyin mappings are "q" and "x", although both have some analogues in European languages as well.
X is probably familiar to most people because of Xi Jinping's surname. I agree with the notion that Q is the Pinyin letter that would cause the most trouble for Westerners.
No, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words.
The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space.
English equivalent would be writing something like "Aldwych", "Leicester Square" or "River Thames" on a sign, and expecting me, a foreigner, to pronounce it correctly.
No, because without tones it can be ambiguous even for native speakers.
If you still don't believe me--or those Wikipedia links I already provided--you test it yourself by finding a native Mandarin speaker. Ask them to decisively determine the meaning and pronunciation of certain Chinese words only from their pinyin with the accents stripped out, such as ma or hua.
There's a store with snacks and produce. Do you want to eat lizi, or do you want to eat lizi? (Don't bother squinting, it's the same letters.)
Tbf the only reasons these spellings still exist is so that the British can sneer at anybody trying to pronounce them.
After moving here A: they weren't that tricky anyway (shire is a given, the only one I had to learn was *eicester) and B: I just get em to pronounce words in Maori.
Some years ago I saw street-signs in China that had both Mandarin characters and also alphabetical versions, and I couldn't understand why they would go so far and then omit the accent marks.
I wonder if it's been fixed since.