Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.因为字母化方案太多了,而且全都不给力。
Well, perhaps that’s too harsh. But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or — even worse — by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings.11 And if you’re serious about a career in Chinese, you’ll have to grapple with at least four or five of them, not including the bopomofu phonetic symbols used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more romanization schemes out there somewhere, most of them mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored. There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method.