Romanisation of Chinese is a difficult problem, but it is important to bear in mind for whom the romanisation scheme is designed. Is the romanisation designed to make it easier for foreigners to pronounce Chinese words, or is it designed simply to represent academically, in the Roman alphabet, the sounds of Chinese? If the scheme is aimed at foreigners, it will have to consider the sounds associated with the letters in the "target" foreign language, as well as the sounds in Chinese, and will therefore be specific to just one pair of languages. Consider how the letter J is pronounced differently in English, French, and German.
In Standard Mandarin Chinese, there are
two sounds that are similar to the hard J (like at the beginning of jungle, jump, jester etc.) in English. In the Pinyin romanisation scheme, one is represented by the letter J, while the other is written ZH. I won't get into the
technical difference here, which is only relevant to Chinese-speakers and CSL students. For the purposes of pronouncing Chinese words when speaking English, I recommend pronouncing both J and ZH like the J at the beginning of jingoism.
The Yale romanisation system, which was developed in 1943 at Yale University, for U.S. Army courses teaching Chinese to American soldiers, is an example of a romanisation scheme designed for the specific language "pair" of Chinese and English, using the normal English pronunciation of letters, but of course it doesn't work for other pairings. For example the surname Zheng could be romanised in Yale to Jung (hard J, and short U in English, like the first syllable of jungle), but a German would read that as "yoong" (like the psychologist), and a Frenchman as "ʒoong", and a Spaniard as "hoong". There simply is no Chinese romanisation scheme that would be intuitive for the speakers of
all languages, and generally the world has settled on Pinyin as the "official" standard, but it requires study to use it correctly.
However, people manage to butcher the pronunciation of Chinese words, even when the romanisation is, or at least
should be, intuitive. Consider the very common mis-pronunciation of Beijing as "Beige-ing". The correct pronunciation is "Bay-jing" (Bay as in "Bay at the moon", and Jing as in "Jingle bells") which uses quite standard English pronunciations of the letters. By contrast, "Beige-ing", gives the J a
French-style pronunciation that is foreign to both English
and Chinese.
