Why don't the Chinese switch to pinyin?

with latin we'll have to write all neologisms like "management" as they are written in english which is stupid and what poles and germans do... with cyrillic we can write things like menedjment, bilbord etc...

Chinese is nearly synonymous with Mandarin, when people say "Chinese", 99 times out of 100 they mean Mandarin.

Homophones aren't entirely gone from Chinese either, there could be 2 different characters with the same sound and tone.
There are also many other inconsistencies with Chinese. There are many cases where tones are changed depending on context; the word for back (背) has a falling tone, but when paired with bag (包) to create the word backpack, 背 changes to a high tone instead.
Like Japanese, there are also duplicate characters with different sounds all together depending on context; 行 can be pronounced as háng or xíng.
Chinese uses Han characters for the same reason the Japanese uses them, to remove nuance and keep context.

Because that would be retarded.
Writing Chinese characters is not as hard as people think. They always have the same rules for their stroke orders.

Then German isn't either because what you most of the time learn is Standard High German

That makes it easiER, but not easy.
There's still at least 2500 characters to learn.
Though I heard that each character having a fuckton of readings is more of a Japanese problem.

How many readings do 生 and 人 have in Chinese?

1 each. Different readings apply to specific characters, which in my opinion is not consistent at all.

>There's still at least 2500 characters to learn.
They are all build of the same basic radicals from which all characters can be reconstructed by adding or removing some of them. And Chinese has the benefit of it being their native letters and so the part of the letter that informs you about the sound is more consistent than in Japanese although there are some sound shifts that make it gone.

Well, as expected of the language the writing system was designed for.

German isn’t a language

He's right. The advantage of Chinese is that their writing system is designed for their spoken language.
The Chinese character for silver (銀) is made up of gold (金), which suggests that it is similar to gold, and the people (民), which suggests that the sound for silver (Yín) is similar to the sound for the people (Mín).

>the Cyrillic alphabet was made specifically for the Russian language
no it wasn't. you had a reform for it to suit russian best but so have all the other usrs. that doesn't mean cyrillic was made specifically for russian.
it was developed in bulgaria for use of all slavs. and it was the bulgarian state that spread it initially
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet

are you aware of this and simply omitted it for brevity's sake or do russians really not know about the origins of cyrillic.

>usrs
users

>Why don't the Chinese switch to pinyin?
>Is Chinese just as much a fucking mess as Japanese?
finally someone who shares my hatred of japanese kanji / chinese characters.

nice to meet you

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I should've been more specific.
The modern Russian alphabet (after the communist simplification) was designed specifically for Russian.

based

yeah, i thought that might have been the case but i figured this was a good chance for me to ask if russians generally knew about the origin of cyrillic

Nice to meet you, too.
> 人、大人、人生、人口
> 上る、上げる
> 下る、下りる、下げる
> 行く、行う
> 上手、上手い
> 家(うち)、家(いえ)
> 後(あと)、後(のち)
> 開く(あく)、開く(ひらく)

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Not really, no one gives a fuck.
I personally didn't know our alphabet had anything to do with Bulgaria.

huh, that's interesting. and you seem to have an interest in languages too. that means dumb normies are even less likely to know.

why dont you ask

I believe the reason for Kanji having multiple readings is because different pronunciations from Chinese for the same character were introduced in multiple waves.

I have understood that all sinitic languages can use (and do use) the same written language. That wouldn't work with latin letters and they all would need either to have their own (not going to happen) or learn mandarin.

I'm not even that angry about the kanji that are pronounced differently _in different combinations_. The verbs that differ only in okurigana are kinda okay too, even though remembering them is a pain.
But what pisses me off is that there are *words* that can be read differently. Even the Japanese themselves sometimes make mistakes when reading out loud.
Not to mention bullshit like irregular okurigana usage.

Introducing one alphabet wouldn't work with Japanese, but neither does using Chinese characters, even if the japs don't want to admit that. They need to design their own writing system.

As far as I'm aware, Pinyin is taught to native Chinese speakers as though each letter represented a sound, similar to characters in Hanzi. The sounds seem to be arbitrarily assigned to the letters.
For example, the letter "c" in Pinyin is actually supposed to be pronounced as a "ts" sound, which is nonsensical for non-native speakers.
Xi and Shi in Chinese both share the same consonant, with the vowels having different pronunciation, yet the consonant is what changes.
It's reasonable to assume that Pinyin, which was made for Mandarin, can be easily used for Cantonese, provided extra diacritics are added to depict the extra tones.

Yeah, it could. But what i meant was that there is just written chinese and all mandarin, cantonese and all the other dialect speakers can read and write the same text.

Yes and I'm saying that the same would broadly apply to the Latin alphabet, under minor modifications. It may not be as universal as Chinese characters, but it can be done.

No it wouldn't. Even if you could use them to write all of them, you would have to write either one or another. Now the written text is just chinese and it depends on the reader if he sees it as mandarin or some other form.