I don’t have a native level of spoken Chinese, no. And I have a very standard Mandarin accent, I try not to offend the locals and instead use Taiwanese preferences when I know the difference.
Going back to the OP, my point is that learning to read and write Chinese characters requires a significant time investment, but if one wants to be functionally proficient in oral Chinese for day to day purposes that is far easier (except, for some people, the tones)
If they can already use the English alphabet, the efficient route to functional communication is pinyin.
Outlier is great. I bought it on Black Friday for like half off or something (maybe only 30% off?) and regret not knowing about it and having it on Pleco sooner. I dont care to memorize how to write characters from memory (and, as @ironlady already said, theres Skritter for that), but being able to look at character components helps a lot. Also, the guys at Outlier pointed out something that most native speakers don’t really consider: characters are made up of components while radicals are actually a relatively arbitrary system for how they set up dictionaries.
The cooking method was originally written as 煠. It is supposed to be pronounced the same way as 葉, which would have been jiᴇp̚ in Middle Chinese, which in Taigi is still tsia̍h. The 炸 character was only invented after the Yuan dynasty, in Late Ming dynasty, Northern China, when checked/entering tones are lost. The first reference to writing 煠 as 炸 was in Ming dynasty novels such as Journey to the West. As a result the character was considered incorrect and not preferred, therefore didn’t get included in the Kangxi Dictionary. Nor could you find it in any of the Song, Tang or even earlier dictionaries.
In Southern China the character 糋 was used for deep fry, see the Song dynasty dictionary Jiyun’s entery:【集韻】子賤切，音箭。煎餌.
The funny thing is the ministry of education or something publishes the correct pronunciation of every word and there are some pretty wacky ones that nobody really uses lol
Luckily everybody just ignores it. The only people I hear pronouncing zha 2nd tone are the anchors on Blue news channels and my wife. Her dad was from Beijing though, so she gets a pass.
In Taigi, 骰子 tâu-á, 骰九 tâu-káu, 撚骰 lián-tâu, 骨骰 kut-tâu, 十八仔 si̍p-pat-á, 十八骰仔 si̍p-pat-tâu-á.
【廣韻】度侯切【集韻】【韻會】【正韻】徒侯切，𠀤音頭。骰子，博陸采具。So it is the name of a dice, a gambling tool, since the Tang dynasty, and the character is supposed to sound the same as the character 頭.
There’s no way for 骰 to be pronounced as shaǐ. Someone just kunyomied a non-Mandarin pronunciation for 色子 on the characters 骰子.
No, they often don’t.
I sat in an interpreting class some years back taught by a famous Taiwanese broadcaster. It was the “proper pronunciation” session. One by one, the teacher walked up to each student and said, in perfect retroflexed Beijing Huarrrrrr, “CHI Fan”. And student after student, mostly quaking in fear because the woman was Really Quite Famous, answered “SI Fan”. And she would repeat it more loudly, and the student would say SI again, and on and on until the teacher gave up and went on to the next student. It was hilarious to watch. I have no idea how much they had paid her to do this class, but she was certainly a big draw for the course as a whole. I doubt anyone got anything out of it, though.
If you asked those people how to spell “shi” in Bopomofo, they would most likely write it correctly (in Bopomofo; never ask them to write in Pinyin or anything like it…lol). They usually don’t write it like they hear it coming out of their own mouths, quite often; they write what they learned in school.
But for the original question – I’d rather spend my time reading extensively, which builds vocabulary and grammar, as well as knowledge of all sorts of things, than drilling written forms of characters. I can recognize characters and read very fluently, but if you asked me to take a test in handwritten form (without that month on Skritter and referring to the test paper wherever possible) I’d fail. Yet I make my living with Chinese, so go figure. I cannot, however, impress anyone at a party. (Probably not only from not knowing characters, though, TBH.)
Just ask Harry Rednapp (famous cockney geezer) his name. He’ll tell you ‘arry Rednapp all day long. It’s not within his genetic makeup to make an H sound. This stuff is hard coded. My family is from Birmingham and I still say sing-ging rather than sing-ing. Born in NZ never lived in the Midlands.
The only way I could reliably remember to write characters was by rote practice, basically writing them over and over in our daily homework. Eventually the characters I used most commonly stuck.
But here’s the thing. My current teacher didn’t give us homework. So I didn’t get that regular practice. And as a result, I cannot remember how to write most of them again.
In conclusion: You need to put in a lot of effort to remember how to write characters, an effort which imo does not even come close to equaling the time put in. Obviously, it depends on your goals, I am only writing because they ask us to do it in class, after I finish this class I will not write Chinese character in my daily life.
Typing and reading - things I will use in daily life in Taiwan - do not require the same amount of effort, they are far easier. So, in my humble opinion, for me writing Chinese is a huge waste of time and I find it more and more irritating that I need to write for class actually.
In Taiwan, 99% of the people also don’t pronounce the zh sound at all. I guess we should get rid of all zh, ch, sh sounds from the bopomofo and the dictionary.