yudantaiteki wrote:

Definitely.  It's a little better in the case of Japanese because writing unknown words in kana, while somewhat childish, is not as jarring/unusual as pinyin in a Chinese sentence.  Also Chinese has no standard way like furigana to show the pronunciation of a hard character in a normal text.

Unless you live in Taiwan, where bopomofo can appear as "furigana", also I don't think it's nearly as widespread in use as in Japanese, since you're supposed to be able to pronounce almost everything, whereas Japanese has a massive amount of irregular readings, and a smaller pool of characters included in education.

I have also seen it used directly in text, but then it has been used as a word from another dialect that doesn't have a character to represent that word. So I think it's probably just as jarring to replace a character with bopomofo in text for a normal chinese word, as pinyin.

As for kana, I hate mixed-writing such as 覚せい剤. When I saw 冒とく I was expecting it to be some rare kun-reading of 冒, and I usually get similar disruptions when reading other such words. And long runs of kana does occur in normal texts as well, and it is tiresome to get through and often warrants a temporary slow-down in reading.

I thought I was going to learn something if I played through Pokemon Black 2 in Japanese on my DS. I had just the same experience as other people here. Reading through the whole game in kana was just horrible.
And with so many words and sentence ending particles that just added nuances to the sentence, it really was a pain.
And if I tried switching to Kanji mode I'd have no clue what the words meant unless I started the daunting task of drawing out the kanji with Microsoft IME pad, which takes forever.