[adelie]

> If you can't communicate with pinyin you can't communicate with the language, since it almost perfectly models the sounds.

hm, i'd say it's a bit more complicated than that. written and literary chinese has a different (often more concise) style than conversational chinese because certain things that would be ambiguous spoken aren't that way when written. similarly, japanese has a perfectly functional syllabary (hiragana), but people will use kanji anyways because it's a lot easier to parse at a glance.