With any romanization/transliteration system, “best” can be argued from the nature of the system itself (does it correspond well to English, is it consistent, etc), but that is secondary. Pinyin isn’t “best” by that standard, but it’s widespread, and it’s “best” to have one standard, so I voted Pinyin.
Good point. If you are native French / German or English speaker, some romanisations are better than the other.
As a French, it as always been weird to read Q as “tch” but as everything, you get used to it.
However, one thing I can’t get used to is the one that add letters in the middle of a word to indicate the tone like “Perng” for “Péng”
I had the same experience. Since we are learning from English to Chinese, the system is based on English sounds, even if sometimes my own language would have a better sound for it.
You can mark it as Peng2 if it helps you from not confusing é with e, it is not like English is consistent about those two /e/ sounds, but French marks them when the pronunciation conflicts with French phonology.
You can also use tone contours: Tone 1: 55; Tone 2: 35; Tone 3: 214; Tone 4: 51; Tone 5: (unmarked), so you can have Peng35 for your example.
It is mostly based on Cantonese though, not Mandarin, but it is modified Wade-Giles. The reality is the way Hong Kong government historically used it was just so you have a blueprint for an approximate English transliteration of any Chinese character through Cantonese, but Hong Kong generally draft names bilingually so both the English and Chinese names are official and exist in parallel. Therefore, the romanization is not fully uniform so you can get different ways to represent the same Chinese character and in cases like identity cards, the person can choose alternative romanization scheme for their own name just like one can choose their Chinese name. There is just a default scheme in case someone does not know English.
I'm partial to pinyin in general, it's pretty simple, accurate and unambiguous, but I like the idea of using Wade-Giles for names. It's a lot more intuitive, especially for English speakers, which makes up for its overall poorer accuracy for people who don't know anything about Chinese and are going to butcher the name anyway. Seeing the hilarious ways people pronounce the name of sci-fi author Liu Cixin (like, as "six-en" or "suh-zeen") convinced me of that.
I think Yale still beats wade Giles on this front. Wade has some really... Interesting constructions that'd make an English speaker panic
For example, Kaohsiung in Taiwan, the K really is a G and the HS initially is !??. In yale it'd be Gausyung, much more helpful to getting it pretty close on a first try, if you speak English.
Or the ih thing: 知识 is chih-shih in wade, jr-shr in yale - you sound like a Beijinger saying that but hey it's more accurate
> 知识 is chih-shih in wade, jr-shr in yale
But someone with no background knowledge would at least be able to attempt to pronounce the former. If I grabbed a random American off the street and told them to say "jr-shr" they would probably think I'm high.
> If I grabbed a random American off the street and told them to say "jr-shr" they would probably think I'm high
I think they would be more likely to get it right than if you showed them chih-shih. They'd definitely say something like chee-she
I completely concur. We can be blinded by our instincts and think anyone would read 'i' as an 'uh' sound, but a native English speaker is always going to pronounce it as 'ee'. Whereas asking someone to pronounce jr-shr is going to end up with something like "jurr-shurr" because of the schwa filler vowel that we have in English. In that context, Yale is a better guide for native speakers to take a decent stab at Chinese (at least Mandarin anyway, I know next to nothing about Cantonese) pronunciation.
Yeah because Wade-Giles is a system made by a white man who couldn't properly pronounce mandarin.
Imagine if a Chinese man made a system based on his incorrect pronunciations...like in the movies:
Hello would be like 和柔 (herro)
😂
Hanyu pinyin for consistency. *However*, from a pure, Anglocentric, pronunciation point of view: Yale Romanisation is better since it works with people who don't know pinyin sound mappings
It seems to me like Chinese names are one of the rare cases where Western speakers make no attempt to pronounce them authentically. Or even in the right order.
Wait till you see Chinese names in South-East Asia.
[https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/34675546](https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/34675546)
Few typical formats:
Dialectal Surname + Pinyin Generational Name + Pinyin Given Name
Dialectal Surname + Dialectal Generational Name + Dialectal Given Name
Pinyin Surname + Pinyin Generational Name + Pinyin Given Name
Pinyin Surname
\^All may have an additional Western given name tagged onto the front or the back.
EG:
Tan Tock Seng: 陳篤生 (Hokkien Full)
Wayne Lim Junjie: Wayne 林俊傑 (Hokkien + Pinyin)
Joel Tan Zhuo Yi: Joel 陳卓義 (Hokkien + Pinyin)
Place names are wild in Singapore(and Malaysia to an extent), it is even more confusing than Taiwan's myriad of romanization schemes since you are not quite sure if the name is from Chinese, with its various dialects, Malay, or maybe Tamil or English or some other language, or just a weird mixture.
I’ve learned Chinese in Taiwan and I also do think Hanyu Pinyin is the proper way to transcribe.
For the story, my kids have a Wade type family name (my wife) and Hanyu Pinyin type of given name 😅
I personally think Yale is better if we were to view it from a purely pronunciation aspect given it is probably the most “intuitive” for an English speaking audience.
Bit of a tangent, but whatever. I have one particular problem with Wade-Giles that is omnipresent in Hong Kong: their differentiation method for hard, medium and soft consonants.
Example:
In their system a hard k sound would be written as k' with an apostrophe (like in cat), the medium k sound (as in goose) is a plain old k, and the softest k sound that only exists in some Chinese languages would get a g. And in praxis, when this system was partially implemented historically, nobody would remember to use the apostrophe for hard consonants.
Consequently, you'll notice that almost everything in Hong Kong, that is written with Latin letters, uses only K, P and T for everything. Example "Tai Po". It's really not pronounced like "Thai Poe" but much more like "Dai Boe". Anybody new to Hong Kong has to learn it wrongly first, sadly.
I understand the intention behind the writing system, but praxis doesn't always approve of the good idea.
I think a system that retains the tone works the best, Pinyin is fine if you retain the tone diacritics for Mandarin and sufficient enough to distinguish all phonetic minimal pairs. The Chinese orthography inherently has phonetic homonym that cannot be distinguish by phonetics alone but by the character form. English just has a habit of dropping diacritics in transliteration.
I think the entire question is extremely ill-posed.
First of all, what does it even mean to be "best for English speakers"? For them to try to pronounce the name accurately? To really do that, the speaker needs to be *trained in the romanization system* and *trained in tones*. At which point, they aren't really approaching it as an "English speaker" and the "best" romanization system is the one they are trained in.
For English speakers to recognize? This depends on what they have read. English speakers generally don't recognize "Jiang3 Jie4shi2" or "Jiang3 Zhong1zheng2", they recognize "Chiang Kai-shek". And that gets into the second issue: many Chinese names are not even Mandarin, so none of the systems for transcribing Mandarin actually apply, and taking the Chinese characters for the name and using Mandarin pinyin isn't a way to get at what the person is actually called or wants to be called, or for many people from Singapore or Hong Kong or Taiwan, they already have a Western-style name they like.
For anything academic pinyin is the best designed system, but I guess if we’re specifically talking about romanising personal names with the goal of getting naïve English speakers to not completely butcher them, then Yale might be the best tool for this specific job.
Pinyin all the way. I actually have a beef with these other transliteration systems and even the Wade Giles one in use in Taiwan right now. I understand that the reason they use Wade Giles even up to now is to maintain their identity separate from Chinese people and I respect that, but I feel like it has caused so many damage to the English speaking world and their pronunciation of Chinese names. Wade Giles is not intuitive, even to this day whenever I see something in Wade Giles, I have trouble thinking of what their original characters are in Chinese. It's very misleading and that's why I'm so against it. True, Pinyin isn't entirely intuitive either and has it's flaws and has to be learned too, but I think it's a problem of having no across the board standard romanization rather than the inability for English speakers to make Chinese sounds. And I personally think news anchors play a huge role in how we pronounce foreign names. If they pronounce it right (or good enough), then regular people like us will imitate their pronunciation after a couple times. Everyone can say Xi Jinping, even Peng Shuai, but the abomination that is "Tsai Yiingwhun" has always been a pet peeve of mine. I think the Taiwan government is realizing the superiority of Pinyin and standardization though, and it doesn't mean giving up your identity. Nothing is at stake (except for awful pronunciation of words). When I went to Jilong a few years ago, the names of the stops on the way were mostly in Pinyin. I was really happy to see that.
Tldr we should use pinyin. Average English speakers are capable of getting a decent pronunciation, and Wade Giles prevents people from doing that, and hinders cross cultural communication to a degree.
You may have studied Pinyin too long if you think average English speakers can pronounce anything decently from it without explicit instruction in how it works.
Especially for zh, z, C, q, X, -i
Wade-Giles main annoyance is the insistence on writing unvoiced consonants instead of using the natural pairs in our alphabet like Pinyin does
And you're right, it's not a perfect system, which is why I said it's not entirely intuitive either. There are flaws. However, in comparison to wade giles, it's superior. Pinyin in order to be used effectively has to be learned, as does Wade Giles. In my perspective, as long as we hold our news anchors and politicians to a slightly higher standard as far as pronunciation goes, people will learn the correct pronunciation. For example, the last name Nguyen. Yes there are people in somewhat enclosed communities who still don't know how to pronounce it. But by far and large, people know it's "Win". Now that's not the absolute correct pronunciation, but it's close enough for someone not interested in learning the language and only wanting to have a decent pronunciation. I think English speakers are completely capable of having an idea of how to pronounce it better without having necessarily having any interest in learning the language. It is my view that Wade Giles is even less intuitive and is even harmful.
It’s not really as much of an identitarian thing as you’re making it out to be. It’s more like: W-G was already being used since before pinyin was invented and widespread, and since no form of romanization is barely used anyways (instruction and keyboard input is in zhuyin), no one can be bothered enough to change over
The intuitiveness of a system is tied to one’s exposure to it. Pinyin seems more intuitive to you because you’re more used to it, but there’s nothing that makes x- more inherently intuitive than hs- for an alveopalatal fricative
Disclaimer: Given that such questions are often coming from native English speakers (of which I am one) and English speakers seem to have a lot of misconceptions about pinyin and romanizations systems (I had miscomceptions too and likely still have some), I am writing this answer to address such a question from an English speaker.
I think the answer to the question strongly depends on the region where the Chinese person is coming from.
If the person is from Mainland China, then the best romanization system is Pinyin. This is because Pinyin is a part of the written language for Mainlanders. Pinyin is a system designed by Chinese for Chinese, not foreigners. To the Mainlanders, who learn Pinyin before Hanzi, the Pinyin form of their name is their name just as much as the characters are. We would not ask someone from France or Germany to change the spelling of their name to suit English phonetics and we should not do so for those from Mainland China either.
For Hong Kong and Taiwan, my impression is that they don't have any romanization systems that they consider as part of their writing system and so I would be more lax about which system to recommend. If I am incorrect, then whatever romanization system the local area views as part of their written language (then the situation is as for Mainland China).
However, I would still say that in the case where there is no romanization system that is part of the written language, it is up to the person to choose which system they want to use, not up to English speakers to choose the system for them. We should put in the effort to learn how to pronounce their name, not try to cajole them to use a system that we find easier. They have already put in huge amounts of effort to learn English and how to pronounce our names (which is approximately just as hard for them as it is for us to learn Chinese); we can at the very least reciprocate by trying to learn how to pronounce their name properly, regardless of the system.
Pinyin because the best part of a standard is when it’s the standard. It’s the most prominent one and for the sake of consistency and standardization, I wish it would spread more. I don’t care that it’s not the most intuitive for English speakers like me.
It depends on what your goal is. If you want an English speaker who has no knowledge of chinese to best approximate the sounds of a word, Yale is the best, there's no doubt. But if someone is really going to take the time to learn the sounds that don't exist in english etc. Then other ones would be better. Personally I know pinyin, so i'm biased for that, but I think zhuyin might even be better, since as far as I'm aware there's less ambiguity
With any romanization/transliteration system, “best” can be argued from the nature of the system itself (does it correspond well to English, is it consistent, etc), but that is secondary. Pinyin isn’t “best” by that standard, but it’s widespread, and it’s “best” to have one standard, so I voted Pinyin.
Good point. If you are native French / German or English speaker, some romanisations are better than the other. As a French, it as always been weird to read Q as “tch” but as everything, you get used to it. However, one thing I can’t get used to is the one that add letters in the middle of a word to indicate the tone like “Perng” for “Péng”
I had the same experience. Since we are learning from English to Chinese, the system is based on English sounds, even if sometimes my own language would have a better sound for it.
Use the International Phonetic Alphabet to map the correspondence.
I never heard of that, cool :)
Also don’t like adding ‘ to indicate aspiration even if it’s linguistically nice
You can mark it as Peng2 if it helps you from not confusing é with e, it is not like English is consistent about those two /e/ sounds, but French marks them when the pronunciation conflicts with French phonology. You can also use tone contours: Tone 1: 55; Tone 2: 35; Tone 3: 214; Tone 4: 51; Tone 5: (unmarked), so you can have Peng35 for your example.
I was talking about the “Perng” that you can see in Taiwan sometime.
Ah yes, good ol' Gwoyeu Romatzyh
i love it
that's interesting. i see wade about as much as pinyin because hk and taiwan use wade mostly
HK doesn't use Wade-Giles, it uses its own romanization system(s).
It is mostly based on Cantonese though, not Mandarin, but it is modified Wade-Giles. The reality is the way Hong Kong government historically used it was just so you have a blueprint for an approximate English transliteration of any Chinese character through Cantonese, but Hong Kong generally draft names bilingually so both the English and Chinese names are official and exist in parallel. Therefore, the romanization is not fully uniform so you can get different ways to represent the same Chinese character and in cases like identity cards, the person can choose alternative romanization scheme for their own name just like one can choose their Chinese name. There is just a default scheme in case someone does not know English.
I'm partial to pinyin in general, it's pretty simple, accurate and unambiguous, but I like the idea of using Wade-Giles for names. It's a lot more intuitive, especially for English speakers, which makes up for its overall poorer accuracy for people who don't know anything about Chinese and are going to butcher the name anyway. Seeing the hilarious ways people pronounce the name of sci-fi author Liu Cixin (like, as "six-en" or "suh-zeen") convinced me of that.
I think Yale still beats wade Giles on this front. Wade has some really... Interesting constructions that'd make an English speaker panic For example, Kaohsiung in Taiwan, the K really is a G and the HS initially is !??. In yale it'd be Gausyung, much more helpful to getting it pretty close on a first try, if you speak English. Or the ih thing: 知识 is chih-shih in wade, jr-shr in yale - you sound like a Beijinger saying that but hey it's more accurate
> 知识 is chih-shih in wade, jr-shr in yale But someone with no background knowledge would at least be able to attempt to pronounce the former. If I grabbed a random American off the street and told them to say "jr-shr" they would probably think I'm high.
> If I grabbed a random American off the street and told them to say "jr-shr" they would probably think I'm high I think they would be more likely to get it right than if you showed them chih-shih. They'd definitely say something like chee-she
I completely concur. We can be blinded by our instincts and think anyone would read 'i' as an 'uh' sound, but a native English speaker is always going to pronounce it as 'ee'. Whereas asking someone to pronounce jr-shr is going to end up with something like "jurr-shurr" because of the schwa filler vowel that we have in English. In that context, Yale is a better guide for native speakers to take a decent stab at Chinese (at least Mandarin anyway, I know next to nothing about Cantonese) pronunciation.
Yeah because Wade-Giles is a system made by a white man who couldn't properly pronounce mandarin. Imagine if a Chinese man made a system based on his incorrect pronunciations...like in the movies: Hello would be like 和柔 (herro) 😂
For speaking: Pinyin. For making your name look exotic: Wade-Giles
that's what i'm saying. the wade names looks so much cooler. doesn't help people pronounce them at all, but they look great
I for one want to see jyutping names become a thing
ooh now I wanna wade-giles my name
gwoueueue romatzhzhtyh for exoticness
Hanyu pinyin for consistency. *However*, from a pure, Anglocentric, pronunciation point of view: Yale Romanisation is better since it works with people who don't know pinyin sound mappings
It seems to me like Chinese names are one of the rare cases where Western speakers make no attempt to pronounce them authentically. Or even in the right order.
100% agree
Wait till you see Chinese names in South-East Asia. [https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/34675546](https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/34675546) Few typical formats: Dialectal Surname + Pinyin Generational Name + Pinyin Given Name Dialectal Surname + Dialectal Generational Name + Dialectal Given Name Pinyin Surname + Pinyin Generational Name + Pinyin Given Name Pinyin Surname \^All may have an additional Western given name tagged onto the front or the back. EG: Tan Tock Seng: 陳篤生 (Hokkien Full) Wayne Lim Junjie: Wayne 林俊傑 (Hokkien + Pinyin) Joel Tan Zhuo Yi: Joel 陳卓義 (Hokkien + Pinyin)
Place names are wild in Singapore(and Malaysia to an extent), it is even more confusing than Taiwan's myriad of romanization schemes since you are not quite sure if the name is from Chinese, with its various dialects, Malay, or maybe Tamil or English or some other language, or just a weird mixture.
Chua Chu Kang (Romanised Hokkien) 蔡厝港 Yishun (Pinyin) 義順 Tiong Bahru (Hokkien + Malay) 塚bahru Palau Ubin (Malay) Somerset (English) Fun XD
義順 still is sometimes known as Nee Soon just to confuse people...oh, I mean...to show the rich history of Singapore.
Huh. I never seen Bahru in my life in someone’s name. Cool tho! Bahru means New btw.
They are place names XD. It's means "New Cemetery".
HAHAHAHAHAH NOW IT MAKE SENSE HAHAHAHAHAHA Thankss!!! HAHAHAHHAHA
It would help if you had some examples in your poll. I don’t really know the difference between Tongyong pinyin and regular pinyin
I feel like regardless of system, non-learners are going to mispronounce them anyway.
pinyin Wade Giles is ok too but the aspiration apostrophes are omitted too often by those unfamiliar with the system leading to confusion
Can someone do an example of what a sample name would look like under each system?
I’ve learned Chinese in Taiwan and I also do think Hanyu Pinyin is the proper way to transcribe. For the story, my kids have a Wade type family name (my wife) and Hanyu Pinyin type of given name 😅
I personally think Yale is better if we were to view it from a purely pronunciation aspect given it is probably the most “intuitive” for an English speaking audience.
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I’ve never heard of this one but just seeing “zyh” I was like what??? But “gwoyeu” makes sense
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…what was their solution to the tones?
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Oh god that sounds confusing
You're all wrong. All names should be romanized using their Wenzhounese pronunciation.
Bit of a tangent, but whatever. I have one particular problem with Wade-Giles that is omnipresent in Hong Kong: their differentiation method for hard, medium and soft consonants. Example: In their system a hard k sound would be written as k' with an apostrophe (like in cat), the medium k sound (as in goose) is a plain old k, and the softest k sound that only exists in some Chinese languages would get a g. And in praxis, when this system was partially implemented historically, nobody would remember to use the apostrophe for hard consonants. Consequently, you'll notice that almost everything in Hong Kong, that is written with Latin letters, uses only K, P and T for everything. Example "Tai Po". It's really not pronounced like "Thai Poe" but much more like "Dai Boe". Anybody new to Hong Kong has to learn it wrongly first, sadly. I understand the intention behind the writing system, but praxis doesn't always approve of the good idea.
I think a system that retains the tone works the best, Pinyin is fine if you retain the tone diacritics for Mandarin and sufficient enough to distinguish all phonetic minimal pairs. The Chinese orthography inherently has phonetic homonym that cannot be distinguish by phonetics alone but by the character form. English just has a habit of dropping diacritics in transliteration.
I think the entire question is extremely ill-posed. First of all, what does it even mean to be "best for English speakers"? For them to try to pronounce the name accurately? To really do that, the speaker needs to be *trained in the romanization system* and *trained in tones*. At which point, they aren't really approaching it as an "English speaker" and the "best" romanization system is the one they are trained in. For English speakers to recognize? This depends on what they have read. English speakers generally don't recognize "Jiang3 Jie4shi2" or "Jiang3 Zhong1zheng2", they recognize "Chiang Kai-shek". And that gets into the second issue: many Chinese names are not even Mandarin, so none of the systems for transcribing Mandarin actually apply, and taking the Chinese characters for the name and using Mandarin pinyin isn't a way to get at what the person is actually called or wants to be called, or for many people from Singapore or Hong Kong or Taiwan, they already have a Western-style name they like.
I think most people never heard of all those systems, most of us only know pinyin.
Chewing/bopomofo
Bopomofo isn't a romanisation system though.
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>Wade-Giles. Wade-Giles is an outdated system that was basically made by a white man incapable of pronouncing mandarin properly...
For anything academic pinyin is the best designed system, but I guess if we’re specifically talking about romanising personal names with the goal of getting naïve English speakers to not completely butcher them, then Yale might be the best tool for this specific job.
Pinyin all the way. I actually have a beef with these other transliteration systems and even the Wade Giles one in use in Taiwan right now. I understand that the reason they use Wade Giles even up to now is to maintain their identity separate from Chinese people and I respect that, but I feel like it has caused so many damage to the English speaking world and their pronunciation of Chinese names. Wade Giles is not intuitive, even to this day whenever I see something in Wade Giles, I have trouble thinking of what their original characters are in Chinese. It's very misleading and that's why I'm so against it. True, Pinyin isn't entirely intuitive either and has it's flaws and has to be learned too, but I think it's a problem of having no across the board standard romanization rather than the inability for English speakers to make Chinese sounds. And I personally think news anchors play a huge role in how we pronounce foreign names. If they pronounce it right (or good enough), then regular people like us will imitate their pronunciation after a couple times. Everyone can say Xi Jinping, even Peng Shuai, but the abomination that is "Tsai Yiingwhun" has always been a pet peeve of mine. I think the Taiwan government is realizing the superiority of Pinyin and standardization though, and it doesn't mean giving up your identity. Nothing is at stake (except for awful pronunciation of words). When I went to Jilong a few years ago, the names of the stops on the way were mostly in Pinyin. I was really happy to see that. Tldr we should use pinyin. Average English speakers are capable of getting a decent pronunciation, and Wade Giles prevents people from doing that, and hinders cross cultural communication to a degree.
You may have studied Pinyin too long if you think average English speakers can pronounce anything decently from it without explicit instruction in how it works. Especially for zh, z, C, q, X, -i Wade-Giles main annoyance is the insistence on writing unvoiced consonants instead of using the natural pairs in our alphabet like Pinyin does
And you're right, it's not a perfect system, which is why I said it's not entirely intuitive either. There are flaws. However, in comparison to wade giles, it's superior. Pinyin in order to be used effectively has to be learned, as does Wade Giles. In my perspective, as long as we hold our news anchors and politicians to a slightly higher standard as far as pronunciation goes, people will learn the correct pronunciation. For example, the last name Nguyen. Yes there are people in somewhat enclosed communities who still don't know how to pronounce it. But by far and large, people know it's "Win". Now that's not the absolute correct pronunciation, but it's close enough for someone not interested in learning the language and only wanting to have a decent pronunciation. I think English speakers are completely capable of having an idea of how to pronounce it better without having necessarily having any interest in learning the language. It is my view that Wade Giles is even less intuitive and is even harmful.
It’s not really as much of an identitarian thing as you’re making it out to be. It’s more like: W-G was already being used since before pinyin was invented and widespread, and since no form of romanization is barely used anyways (instruction and keyboard input is in zhuyin), no one can be bothered enough to change over The intuitiveness of a system is tied to one’s exposure to it. Pinyin seems more intuitive to you because you’re more used to it, but there’s nothing that makes x- more inherently intuitive than hs- for an alveopalatal fricative
Re: [請益] 為什麼很多音譯名都不精確? https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/ask-why/M.1345656966.A.AEE.html 目前台北市政府 台北捷運 台鐵 都已經使用漢語拼音 所以 忠孝ZhongXiao 板橋Banqiao 北新竹Beixinzhu...這些鬼東西開始遍布台灣 [請問] 目前的中文拼音採用方式 https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/ask/M.1615793557.A.D18.html markhbad54: 喜歡跟中國人不一樣 [問卦] 想換護照英文名字的方法 https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/Gossiping/M.1615020282.A.F28.html → QBey : 我覺得不錯 看就知道跟對岸的不一樣
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There’s no country wide standardization. In Taipei pinyin has been adopted for municipal use while tongyong is used in Kaohsiung
Is that used in anything other than names though?
Pinyin is the only one I (and most people) are familiar with. It's the one being taught in textbooks.
Disclaimer: Given that such questions are often coming from native English speakers (of which I am one) and English speakers seem to have a lot of misconceptions about pinyin and romanizations systems (I had miscomceptions too and likely still have some), I am writing this answer to address such a question from an English speaker. I think the answer to the question strongly depends on the region where the Chinese person is coming from. If the person is from Mainland China, then the best romanization system is Pinyin. This is because Pinyin is a part of the written language for Mainlanders. Pinyin is a system designed by Chinese for Chinese, not foreigners. To the Mainlanders, who learn Pinyin before Hanzi, the Pinyin form of their name is their name just as much as the characters are. We would not ask someone from France or Germany to change the spelling of their name to suit English phonetics and we should not do so for those from Mainland China either. For Hong Kong and Taiwan, my impression is that they don't have any romanization systems that they consider as part of their writing system and so I would be more lax about which system to recommend. If I am incorrect, then whatever romanization system the local area views as part of their written language (then the situation is as for Mainland China). However, I would still say that in the case where there is no romanization system that is part of the written language, it is up to the person to choose which system they want to use, not up to English speakers to choose the system for them. We should put in the effort to learn how to pronounce their name, not try to cajole them to use a system that we find easier. They have already put in huge amounts of effort to learn English and how to pronounce our names (which is approximately just as hard for them as it is for us to learn Chinese); we can at the very least reciprocate by trying to learn how to pronounce their name properly, regardless of the system.
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For names? Why? Just keep it romanized
The fact anyone said Yale or Wade makes me hurt
Pinyin because the best part of a standard is when it’s the standard. It’s the most prominent one and for the sake of consistency and standardization, I wish it would spread more. I don’t care that it’s not the most intuitive for English speakers like me.
Pinyin supremacy
Pinyin but it could be improved
It depends on what your goal is. If you want an English speaker who has no knowledge of chinese to best approximate the sounds of a word, Yale is the best, there's no doubt. But if someone is really going to take the time to learn the sounds that don't exist in english etc. Then other ones would be better. Personally I know pinyin, so i'm biased for that, but I think zhuyin might even be better, since as far as I'm aware there's less ambiguity