alt Hacker News> It might seem weird for us to teach beginners Python, knowing that they’ll then have agents output other, faster languages. I see an analogy here with Chinese: Many people don’t realize this, but children in China first learn Latin characters, which they use to spell out Chinese phonetically, using a system called “pinyin.” They then use their knowledge of Latin characters to learn Chinese characters, whose pronunciation isn’t obvious from the characters themselves.
The article did explain, albeit near the end.
Pinyin is widely used, but pinyin’s primacy is oversold. Chinese texts start with teaching Chinese characters - many are recognizable to children from daily exposure to begin with, so they don’t need the pinyin. Pinyin only comes in when the character is genuinely unknown.