I read this interesting blog from John Pasden on the use of Zhuyin.
It made me wonder how popular it actually is these days as I know that they use traditional characters in Taiwan so this is probably popular there and other parts of China.
This is particularly interesting to me primarily because I want to practice my reading in mandarin so I have been going to the public library in my city the last few weeks to find children’s books written in simplified characters. To my surprise I discovered that most of the available materials are actually written in traditional characters and zhuyin so I started to wonder why this may be.