Reading · how it works
How Chinese is written.
There are three things to learn, and they do different jobs. Characters are how Chinese is written.Pinyin spells the sound of each character in Latin letters. Tones are the pitch of each syllable, and they are part of the word. Everything else on this page is detail about those three.
One word, three ways to look at it
Character
What you read on a sign or a menu. One character, one syllable.
Pinyin
hǎo
How to say it, spelled in letters you already know. It is also how everyone types Chinese.
Tone
ˇ
The mark over the vowel. This one dips low. Change it and you change the word.
Characters
A character is a written syllable that carries meaning. Most are built from smaller parts: one part usually hints at the meaning and another at the sound. 妈, mother, is女, woman, beside 马, which is said mǎ. Once you know a few hundred parts, new characters stop being pictures to memorise and become combinations you can partly read.
There are tens of thousands of characters in dictionaries, but everyday reading uses far fewer. The official list of common characters in mainland China has 2,500 entries, and those cover the great majority of what you will meet in a newspaper. A beginner needs a few hundred to read signs and menus.
Simplified and traditional
Mainland China and Singapore use simplified characters, and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use traditional ones. Many characters are the same in both. This site teaches simplified, and shows the traditional form on each character page where it differs, so you can recognise it.
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official way of writing Mandarin sounds in the Latin alphabet. Children in China learn it before characters, it is printed above characters in textbooks, and it is how nearly everyone types on a phone: you type the pinyin and pick the character. It is not a simplified or second-class version of Chinese, it is a tool, and a precise one.
Most of it sounds the way an English speaker expects. About eight spellings do not, and those are worth ten minutes now.
Tones
Mandarin has four tones and a neutral one. The tone is part of the syllable, the same way a vowel is part of it in English, so a word said in the wrong tone is simply a different word.
The order that works
Tones and pinyin first, because they are small, finite and make everything else pronounceable. Then the daily lessons, with characters coming in alongside rather than before. Starting with characters is the most common way to give up in the first month: without the sounds there is nothing to attach them to.