[HansTWN]

Sure it takes kids longer to learn to read and write Chinese than English, then again it takes a German all his life to learn German grammar! Chinese, on the other hand basically has no grammar. No tenses, the verb never changes, no cases, basically no plural forms, no changes for gender, nothing! It is almost impossible to explain to a Chinese speaker with no foreign language background the complications of cases in German. And they come back with the question, why? And they are right. You don't need grammar, it is just the way the languages developed in different ways, a reflection of the culture. Chinese is difficult in some ways, but incredibly easy in other ways.

It really would make no sense to start writing Chinese with an alphabet or a syllabary. Simply because of the structure of the language. If my explanation earlier in this thread didn't suffice, then I suggest you read up on it. And kids learn fast, even though it takes them quite a few years until they can read the paper, they can communicate in writing much earlier than 10. They just cannot write every word they can say. That is where computers come in. It is much easier to recognize a character when you see it than to remember how to write it by hand. And on a computer you always pick the right character from a list, you don't have to remember every detail. Children's books are usually with both phonetics and characters. For a Westerner the task seems much more daunting than it is when you grow up in that environment. The only way for us to learn to read Chinese is to read some Chinese every day.

Your Pin-Yin keyboard is for writing Chinese, yes. And what you see on the keys are the phonetic symbols of the Taiwanese bopomofo system. Those are the ones that Taiwanese children learn at a very young age, before they are taught Chinese characters. These symbols are phonetic, they only represent sounds and have no meanings, they are not Chinese characters. Sort of like letters (though some are sound combinations, like ang, ong, ao, and ou).