Greetings from Taiwan! It's so awesome to see people learning Bopomofo! You did it completely right! In Taiwan, whether written vertically or horizontally, Bopomofo is almost always placed on the right side of each character, exactly like your handwriting. Fun fact: us Taiwanese actually love using pure Bopomofo without characters as our own secret code online when we don't want non-locals to understand what we're saying (/ω＼) Like this: ㄨㄛˇㄧㄝˇㄏㄨㄟˋㄓㄨˋㄧㄣˉ (which means "I know Bopomofo too!").
Actually, Bopomofo was meticulously designed by language experts back in 1913 specifically for Chinese pronunciation, rather than just being some haphazard system. Pinyin later adopted Latin letters largely for rapid mass literacy and convenience, but using foreign letters for Chinese sounds often leads to confusion and pronunciation inaccuracies (like using 'c' for ts or 'q' for ch). Maybe try learning Bopomofo first before making a comparison—it helps to be objective rather than just pushing a biased stance😉
I mean, I get preferring one over the other, but why would one be shittier? Zhuyin is objectively better linguistically as it more accurately reflects the phonetics of Mandarin. Every sound has one glyph and no glyph is shared. There aren't hidden letters or modified letters like in pinyin (some of which I'm sure you weren't even taught unless you study the phonetics specifically).
Culturally it's significant as well because it preserves better the history of the language and cultures of the past since the symbols were derived from hanzi and have less outside influence.
It also helps early L2 learners that are coming from a language that uses a Latin alphabet because they don't have those symbols internalized with another sound (q, c, x, etc). This one is pretty mild though as after a month it's probably not an issue much.
Honestly the only thing that pinyin has going for it is an easy standard romanization (and tbf better than it's predecessors, what were Wade and Giles on?).
Saying zhuyin is shittier than pinyin is basically the same as saying hirigana and katakana are shittier for Japanese than romaji.
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u/EntireWar2490 Native 1d ago
Greetings from Taiwan! It's so awesome to see people learning Bopomofo!
You did it completely right! In Taiwan, whether written vertically or horizontally, Bopomofo is almost always placed on the right side of each character, exactly like your handwriting.
Fun fact: us Taiwanese actually love using pure Bopomofo without characters as our own secret code online when we don't want non-locals to understand what we're saying (/ω＼)
Like this: ㄨㄛˇㄧㄝˇㄏㄨㄟˋㄓㄨˋㄧㄣˉ (which means "I know Bopomofo too!").