@Brendan

Yeah, I actually taught myself GR romanization long before I had any interest in speaking the language, as I'm a bit of a scriptophile. Imho, GR takes better advantage of the phonology of mandarin than pinyin (e.g. by not having separate letters for the palatals -- who needs 'em?).

As far as I'm concerned, the best writing system chinese has ever had was Phags-pa. Good old Kublai Khan knew what was what.