As someone who's planning to move to Taiwan soon, I've started learning 注音 this week. I tried to add the bopomofo characters to skritter, and I got errors - that they weren't valid Chinese words. What about making unicode 注音 symbols valid skritter characters, and making it an official skritter list a la the radicals list? I've already added them to my Anki cards, but I'd love to have them in Skritter as well.

BTW, I have to thank skritter big time. Thanks to skritter (and Anki, which I discovered through skritter.com), I'm almost as comfortable now with traditional characters and I am with simplified characters, and that means I'm going to be able to hit the ground running when I get to Taiwan.

Actually, having learned Chinese in Taiwan, I found that bopomofo took just a few weeks to master, for all the students in my class. So I don't really see a great need for practiciting writing them in Skritter. What is taking longer time, is to be able to read it faster. To that end, I would actually prefer to have the pronunciation of the words on Skritter be in bopomofo rather than pinyin...

But even in Taiwan, when we were given a choice of pinyin or bopomofo, most foreign students opted for pinyin; so I understand bopomofo is a niche market. And Skritter is already focused on simplified rather than traditional characters. But, granted, bopomofo is "just" a teaching aid, while pinyin is a full fledged publication format. As a teaching site, though, it would be nice to have the option on Skritter. My chosen iPhone dictionary is HippoDict mainly because of the bopomofo display :)

I'm very happy with having bopomofo as my foundation. The pronunciation is a much better match for the symbols used, and I find the system more direct and without difficult exceptions than pinyin. And of course, you avoid the confusion with the "English" (or your own latin-character-based native language) sounds suggested by the pinyin letters.

I like the idea of adding alternate romanization choices to Skritter, so that you could do bopomofo or Gwoyeu Romatzyh. We'll have that eventually.

If it were just unlocking the bopomofo character ranges and creating the characters, I'd do it now, but we also have to change all the readings around because everything for Chinese is expecting valid pinyin syllables. The pronunciations (and definitions) for bopomofo would just be like "ch" or "m" or "ang".

So I've put it on the list, but it's pretty low priority.

Zhuyin is more than a niche market as almost nothing in here (I live in Taiwan) is written in BPMF (100% Pinyin) thus learning Zhuyin when you already know how to use pinyin is quite useless and you will never have to write it with a pen.

However, as 沈唯達 said it can be mastered quite quickly (actually few days is enough) and it transcript the chinese sound much better than the pinyin does. Also, the knowledge of zhuyin is necessary if you want to use telephone or write chinese on a public computer (perso I use "Quick" it's even faster)

@Nick : BPMF is not a romanization, it's the "Hiragana" of Chinese :)