In what way would it be incredibly difficult? By the way, “Bopomofo” is also used by mainlanders to refer to learning HYPY, so if you ever find yourself talking to mainlanders or people who learned there about this topic, you might be better off refering to it by name: MPS or zhuyinfuhao.
This was a concern in Singapore years ago when they started their Huayu campaign. The few Singapore English and Chinese teachers I know have all said that it’s not really a problem since the contexts in which kids see the symbols of HYPY and the letters of English are completely different. I think there have been a few papers written on this, all of which seemed to argue that learning HYPY and English phonics at the same time isn’t really a problem for kids. I wouldn’t necessarily trust a paper published in a Singapore journal since I doubt they’d be publishing studies that go against the government’s policy of promoting Huayu and English at the same time. I’ll keep an eye out for any papers published in somewhat reputable journals.
Learning MPS wouldn’t hurt you here, but the main thing I think you should focus on is being able to hear sounds and then accurately relate them to phonetic symbols, be they HYPY or MPS. That means using whatever system is most convenient for you. While in Taiwan, I found that quite a lot of educated people knew the “citation” symbols for most words, but their pronunciation of those words was very much localized, to the point where they pronounced sh- as s-, even though they would write the MPS for sh-. I think the main task for any learner mostly takes place in their own brains: hearing sounds and relating them to the symbols they know. If you’re learning in a “dialect area” like Taiwan, you also have to figure out how the sounds of local speech correspond to the “standard” pronunciation found in dictionaries. If your girlfriend or whoever you’re learning from speaks pretty “standard” Mandarin, then learning MPS could be helpful because the sounds she’ll demonstrate will match the symbols she can show you. If her pronunciation is pretty local, and you’ve already gone a good way towards learnign HYPY, then I’d be less in a hurry to learn MPS.
An example of what I’m talking about when I say that it all happens in your head is an English friend of mine here in HK. Most locals who meet her agree that she is native-like in Canto. She’s been here about ten years and is married to a local. She doesn’t read or write, but her spoken Canto is good enough that she’s often mistaken for a local over the phone. She never learned any formal system of phonetic symbols and never attended any Canto lessons. Instead, she made up her own phonetic symbols based on what she heard. Before learning Canto, she had learned four or five European languages in naturalistic settings. Anyway, a couple of years ago a guy in the linguistics department of a local university used her as an informant. He asked her to transcribe in her own system of phonetic symbols a list of words and a passage of speech read aloud; all the phonemes and tones of Canto were covered at least once in the list of words, and then once more again in the passage. He then analyzed what she had written to see if she had identified all the phonemes and tones of Canto. She was 100% spot on. Every symbol in her own system matched up to the symbols in formal systems like the Linguistic Society of HK’s Jyutpin system. Now I’m not suggesting that you forget about HYPY and MPS and instead make up your own system, but the conclusion I draw from her experience is that we should focus on the sounds before anything else. The system of symbols you use to represent them on paper is of secondary importance.
I don’t know, I find it kind of quaint. When talking to a friend visiting from Taichung the other day, we joked that if the future MRT line there has more than one station on Wenxin Road, they should just name the different stations according to those spellings. “Next station Wen Hsin Road with an H…next station Wen Sin Road with an S.” 