>>5328814As far as I'm aware, Pinyin is taught to native Chinese speakers as though each letter represented a sound, similar to characters in Hanzi. The sounds seem to be arbitrarily assigned to the letters.
For example, the letter "c" in Pinyin is actually supposed to be pronounced as a "ts" sound, which is nonsensical for non-native speakers.
Xi and Shi in Chinese both share the same consonant, with the vowels having different pronunciation, yet the consonant is what changes.
It's reasonable to assume that Pinyin, which was made for Mandarin, can be easily used for Cantonese, provided extra diacritics are added to depict the extra tones.
