I asked this because I know that my younger students, from the young ones who are just developing phonemic awareness of the English alphabet, to the older ones who have the pronunciation system of the English alphabet ingrained in their memories often get confused at the Pinyin pronunciations. They see the same letters used in English now used for Pinyin, and are pronunced differently. For example, in English, "q" is generally prounounced "qua." However, in Chinese, the "q" is pronounced like a "ch" so "qi" is not "quee" but rather "chee" (like cheese).
Since I have observed this confusion in my classroom, I was curious as to whether the converse were true with Chinese students. My impression was that these students would have learned Pinyin before characters. It is how Chinese is taught here in the U.S., and I've also seen mention of the fact that Pinyin is taught in the early grades in China in some journal articles.
In this group of students from China, however, I received some unexpected answers. I had one student who said he never learned Pinyin at all, and another student who said she didn't learn Pinyin until middle school. The others didn't really respond to my question at all. Either they didn't understand, or did not experience confusion between Pinyin and the English alphabet. Anyhow, I was very surprised that a student from China (in High School) would have never been exposed to Pinyin, when I thought that Pinyin was pretty universal.
I think I would like to ask our Chinese students more about how they learned to read and write Chinese. It would be interesting to find out how different their actual learning experiences are to what I think it is, or even what prior academic studies have concluded. I realize that it's not a scientifically controlled cohort, but at least the students can provide their own authentic experiences. More food for thought...and more things to do with my copious free time! :-)