I want to try to articulate an idea I see represented elsewhere without dismissing the value of what’s being offered here.
There are many comments to the effect that this is a crutch that will inhibit future learning. I agree with that assessment.
I also agree that such a tradeoff is probably fine for many people, depending on their goals.
I studied music composition in college and then worked in adult world language curriculum. Perhaps a useful analogy is the use of Romanization to teach world languages to native English speakers (romaji, pinyin, etc.)
For languages like Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) where there is (virtually) no phonetic information in the writing system, it’s just too dang hard for a lot of people to make the leap to pronouncing characters as they are reas by natives. Pinyin or its equivalents are an “inauthentic” but valuable tool, but eventually you have to discard it to progress.
With straightforward phonetic languages like Korean, it’s actually counterproductive to try to bridge people to familiar symbols, because there’s very few resources for the learner until they start mapping sounds to Hangul.
That’d be my argument—-if you find you can’t easily make the leap to reading music and just want to get playing, sure, use this. But know that there’s a whole world of communication out there that you’ll be missing until you abandon this simplified representation and cross the full chasm.
This whole argument in favor of sheet music reminds me quite a lot of the defense of Chinese/Japanese characters. Yes, there is a long glorious tradition of using them, but assuming that they are the optimal solution and that any exploration of better methods is wrongheaded seems unsupported. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese, Korean developed its own superior phonetic replacement for the characters (Hangul) and Vietnamese is now written in the Roman alphabet (originally for the convenience of French colonizers but independent Vietnam shows no desire to go back to characters).
I agree in the sense that in both cases the argument that holds water is less about what’s “better” and more about what’s practical. The status quo is how millions of people do it, so if you want to communicate with them you’ll probably be more successful learning their conventions vs. convincing others to use your own.
Getting philosophical, I believe there could be a more efficient/learnable notation system, but I’m bearish on one inventor or committee inventing it in a lonely tower, because of how e.g. the French and Spanish academies try so hard to prescribe clarity for their countries’ official languages and then people just go and do the organic language evolution thing to meet their local communication needs anyway.
But there are rare counterexamples like Shong Lue Yang, a spiritual leader who created an effective writing system for Hmong.
There are many comments to the effect that this is a crutch that will inhibit future learning. I agree with that assessment.
I also agree that such a tradeoff is probably fine for many people, depending on their goals.
I studied music composition in college and then worked in adult world language curriculum. Perhaps a useful analogy is the use of Romanization to teach world languages to native English speakers (romaji, pinyin, etc.)
For languages like Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) where there is (virtually) no phonetic information in the writing system, it’s just too dang hard for a lot of people to make the leap to pronouncing characters as they are reas by natives. Pinyin or its equivalents are an “inauthentic” but valuable tool, but eventually you have to discard it to progress.
With straightforward phonetic languages like Korean, it’s actually counterproductive to try to bridge people to familiar symbols, because there’s very few resources for the learner until they start mapping sounds to Hangul.
That’d be my argument—-if you find you can’t easily make the leap to reading music and just want to get playing, sure, use this. But know that there’s a whole world of communication out there that you’ll be missing until you abandon this simplified representation and cross the full chasm.