Quote Originally Posted by nice gaijin
Oh yes, a Malaysian friend of mine once showed me the pronunciation key used in Taiwan. I wasn't aware that native speakers used the roman characters during study, but I suppose it makes sense. Once a character's proper pronunciation is learned, however, do native speakers ever use pin yin for the character again? It seems like it would be counter-productive, unless pin yin is the input method for Chinese, like romaji for Japanese.
Yes, pin yin can be used to find the Chinese characters in order to type Chinese fonts on computers. It can also be used to find words in computerize dictionaries or dictionaries.