Pinyin is cleaner but really misleading if you’re trying to pronounce a word just with your knowledge of other Latin based writing systems.

X- is pronounced like sh

Q- is pronounced like ch

C- is pronounced like ts

-iu is pronounced like yo

-ian is pronounced like yen

etc

In this regard even Wade-Giles does a better job in my opinion.

"Pronounced like" in this context really means "vaguely similar, but actually fundamentally different". There is no English equivalent to the phonemes represented in pinyin by j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r or z. English simply doesn't have alveolo-palatal or retroflex consonants. If anything, I think that pinyin is less misleading than Wade-Giles, because it doesn't lull you into false confidence. I have a weak preference for bopomofo, but that's another argument entirely.

I think you're right about highlighting the quality of the consonants when it comes to official mandarin, but those characteristics fade when it comes to regional variants.

Yo be clear, mandarin is of the most concern, just want to raise the issue that while true, it's not uniform throughout the language.

It's a fair point, but a pretty niche one - I expect that the overwhelming majority of foreign-language pinyin users are learning standard Mandarin. If you're learning Min or Wu as a second language, you've got bigger problems than the quirks of your transliteration scheme.

For native users of pinyin, the consistency with English pronunciation is essentially irrelevant.

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear and also for belaboring the point. I wasn't referring to separate dialects, but local non northern mandarin which gets pronounced slightly differently than received pronunciation.

A brief example, yes/is, approx [shi], might be pronounced approx [si], etc. But it's mandarin and not hakka, min, etc.

> Yeah, why not use the Slovene alphabet and add some carons to short vowels and be done?

Kazakh makes a phonemic distinction between [g] and [ɣ]. Slovene, and most European languages, doesn’t have that distinction and their writing systems are therefore not equipped to represent it.

Huh. That's interesting. Do you know if that's positional? I.e. it's predictable? For example in English you know an "s" is /z/ when between voiced vowels, most of the time. Or OE "good" vs "geostran dag".

In any event, as per English, French, among others, an alphabet does not have to orthographically represent the phonemes exactly.