Mandarin Chinese Homophones with Same Pronunciation, Different Characters

Learning the Standard Chinese language (华语, Huáyǔ) can be tough. Indeed, Pinyin has already become the standard over Zhuyin in the international market. Taiwan uses Zhuyin simply as part of its cultural identity, treating it with the same value as the Hindi alphabet. However, I'm still in favor of Taiwan abolishing Zhuyin entirely, because the Chinese Communist Party didn't invent Pinyin. Instead, Pinyin was invented by a critic of the CCP! After trying to learn Pinyin, one thing that can be overlooked is that, after reciting the Bopomofo table (as an easier way to recall Pinyin), we're getting into Chinese homophones.

Here's an example of homophones. It can be confusing. I was practicing typing in Chinese (using Pinyin) and remembered that inputs can have multiple meanings. It wasn't enough to learn how to pronounce the tones. One must deal with Chinese characters that have the exact same Pinyin and tone. Transliterating Zhuyin had made it easier to learn Standard Chinese. In my case, I'm prone to calling Pinyin "bopomofo" (read here). However, it doesn't mean learning Standard Chinese has become easy as pie. Work can be made easy with good tools, but it doesn't mean hard work is removed from the equation. 

For example, Tiger Sugar's Chinese characters are read as "Lǎohǔ táng hēitáng zhuānmài". I noticed two different characters here have the same Pinyin input (táng), namely 堂 (hall) and 糖 (sugar). The literal meaning is Tiger Hall Dark Sugar Specialty. I thought my translator was broken until I looked in a digital English-Chinese dictionary. Yes, these are the homophones, and they can be utterly confusing, especially for people outside China or Taiwan!

Pretty much, achieving Chinese literacy is a real challenge. Chinese schools in the Philippines, back in my day, failed to anticipate that learning Chinese had to change. After all, the next generation of Chinese Filipinos would be more Filipinized in their lifestyles. Changing the way Chinese is taught would mean even non-Chinoys can now learn Mandarin.