Confucius says: Swallow the swallow!

[nipponman]

Of course you can write modern Chinese just using phonetic characters, it's how pinyin works, but I do agree that with classical chinese you really do need to see the characters (and then you need your teacher to explain what the damn thing means, how the character means something completely different to what it means now, and how its a verb not a noun etc etc)

I don't think that that is possible. pinyin's only purpose is to learn chinese characters and pronunciation. Hanzi are one of the best ways to write Chinese, pinyin just won't work. It would be impossible to tell what someone is saying. Didn't you see the poem? can you tell what that is without characters?

nipponman

[geraldc]

That stone lion story is classical Chinese, that has a different grammar and different pronunciations for words, even if you read it out aloud you couldn't understand it, so it can hardly be described as a language.

Anything you can say in mandarin, you can write in pinyin. To say that you must have Chinese characters to understand chinese would mean that people who can't read Chinese characters can't understand Chinese, or that you can't understand what people say on the radio, because you can't see what they're talking about or which characters they're using.

[nipponman]

Maybe not. Because, I get the feeling (maybe wrong though), that you could write more monosylabically than speak because you're obviously gonna convey more meaning when you use characters. Believe me, you cannot have an all pinyin writing system, it just wouldn't work. I post more later, kinda tired now though,

nipponman

[shibo77]

I wrote a post here:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5-how-many-characters-do-you-know844

-Shìbó

[nipponman]

Notice how all the native people had a hard time understanding the pinyin text.

[rockytriton]

I always liked these two confucian sayings:

Man who run in front of car gets tired.

Man who run behind car gets exhausted.

of course they are just jokes, but funny.