>Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations.
How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.
>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.
How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.
>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.