Romaji is frowned upon for Japanese because many learners are prone to mispronunciation when using that script - it's actually also much harder to read compared to Kanji+Hiragana or even just Hiragana. However, it's still useful to know for typing anything in Japanese.
For learning Chinese, I can use pinyin without spending time to actually learn it formally. Since I know how to type standard QWERTY keys, just by playing around in pinyin, I can find the characters I want to lookup. However, the words that are displayed are still Hanzi so everything's fine. OTOH, if I learned zhuyin, I would have to learn where the bopomofo characters are located on the keyboard and relearn how to type - not much fun.
The hatred towards Romaji is mainly towards using it as a written script. I don't think there's any animosity towards using it as a lookup tool.
For learning Chinese, I can use pinyin without spending time to actually learn it formally. Since I know how to type standard QWERTY keys, just by playing around in pinyin, I can find the characters I want to lookup. However, the words that are displayed are still Hanzi so everything's fine. OTOH, if I learned zhuyin, I would have to learn where the bopomofo characters are located on the keyboard and relearn how to type - not much fun.
The hatred towards Romaji is mainly towards using it as a written script. I don't think there's any animosity towards using it as a lookup tool.
Edited: 2013-09-17, 4:43 am