It’s a myth that Hanyu pinyin is derived from Russian and Cyrillic. It is based on Latin with reference to various European languages that use the Latin alphabet, notably German. Z is pronounced very similarly to its pronunciation in German and Italian (e.g. nazi, pizza). X is pronounced rather as it is in Portuguese (where is sounds like English SH, and which is derived from the pronunciation of the Greek letter chi.) CH, SH and R are pronounced similarly to the way they are in English, and ZH has the same relation to Z as CH does to C and so on.

Our SoundBox app is now incorporated into our Hanping Dictionary apps.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary Lite: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.embermitre.hanping.app.lite
Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.embermitre.hanping.app.pro
Hanping Cantonese Dictionary: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.embermitre.hanping.cantodict.app.pro

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.embermitre.hanping.app.soundbox

IPA is the only way to go if you want to talk pronunciation, but as you say, it’s not as accessible and difficult to both type and display. I like IPA a lot and writing an article about Chinese and IPA is quite high on my list. 🙂 I agree with your observations of Zhuyin!

Pinyin has so awkward features, such as Zhi. The vowel is seemlying silent.

Initials and Finals can be a helpful approach; but with BPMF, their are elements that seem to be medials. A look at the complete listing of BPMF will confirm that is deceptive — Initials adn Finals prevail in both representation.

It certainly helps to learn both and to do a comparision. I actually prefer to write BPMF as it is a shorthand and very compact.

I spent some time looking at Zhuyin. I’m no expert, but my conclusion was that, while it feels good to try a different transcription system to wean myself from bad Pinyin pronunciation habits, Zhuyin feels no better than Pinyin, just differently wrong. (I think it _has_ helped me understand occasional otherwise baffling Zhuyin-caused hypercorrection in pronunciation examples…)

Until now I’ve kept away from IPA because it’s too weird, too hard to write and display, and I’m lazy (uh, all I know is schwa ə). But Unicode support has improved so I may finally be ready to learn at least the subset of IPA that applies to Mandarin. It’s time!

This page seems to be a nice overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Mandarin
It links to this Chinese-to-IPA converter:
http://easypronunciation.com/en/chinese-pinyin-phonetic-transcription-converter

中文揭密
tʂʊŋ1wu̯ən2 tɕi̯ɛ1 mi4

So weird! 🙂

Yeah, it’s about accepting the fact that basing your reading on individual letters in Pinyin isn’t very good. 🙂