Beginner questions
Is there a Chinese alphabet?
No. Chinese writes words with characters, and it spells their sounds with pinyin, which uses the Latin alphabet.
A character is not a letter. Each one is a whole syllable, and most carry a meaning. You learn them one by one, as parts of words.
Pinyin is the closest thing Chinese has to an alphabet. It is how you learn to say a word before you can read it.
Characters, not letters
Here are ten simple characters. Tap one to hear it and see what it means.
Many characters are built from smaller parts. (good) is (woman) next to (child). Once you know the common parts, new characters get easier to remember. How to read Chinese characters shows how the parts work.
Chinese has thousands of characters, but you do not need them all at once. The most common characters come up again and again, so each one you learn pays off.
Pinyin spells the sounds
means “spelled sounds”. Most syllables have three parts: a start sound (the initial), the rest of the syllable (the final), and a tone.
The tone is the pitch of your voice. Mandarin has four tones and a light neutral tone, and they change the meaning. Here is one syllable, ma, five ways:
Pinyin marks the tone over a vowel: mā, má, mǎ, mà. When a text leaves the marks out, “ma” could be any of these words.
How many sounds there are
Mandarin has 21 initials and about three dozen finals. Together they make about 400 syllables, before you add the tones.
That is a small set. English has far more syllables. In Chinese, many words share a sound, and the tones tell them apart.
Pinyin letters that do not sound like English
Most pinyin letters sound close to English. These seven do not, and they are among the ones beginners misread most. Tap a word to hear it.
| Pinyin | Close to | Hear it |
|---|---|---|
| x | a soft “sh”, with the tip of the tongue behind the lower teeth | |
| q | a soft “ch”, with the tongue tip behind the lower teeth and a puff of air | |
| c | the “ts” in “cats”, with a strong puff of air | |
| z | the “ds” at the end of “kids” | |
| zh | a “j”, with the tongue curled back | |
| r | between the English “r” and the “s” in “pleasure” | |
| ü | “ee” said with rounded lips |
Chapter 2 of the roadmap has every initial and final with audio, and the tone changes you hear every day.
Test your ear
Listen to a syllable and pick its pinyin. The sounds are the initials, each in a common word.
Hear a sound, pick its pinyin.
10 rounds, with audio.
Next step
Read a story in Chinese.
Dengdeng has Beginner stories, written for your first months of Chinese, with pinyin you can turn on for every word. Tap a word to see what it means.
Beginner · Animals
我的猫My cat
I have a cat. Her name is Xiaobai. Xiaobai loves to sleep. She sleeps twelve hours a day!
Tap a word
Free Beginner stories
Before you sign up, a short reading check starts you at Beginner if the first sentences are new to you. One Beginner story is free every day.
Your first 100 characters
Ten characters every two days, grouped so the parts repeat. 100 characters and the words they make, in 20 days.
Questions
Before you start.
How many letters are in the Chinese alphabet?
None, because Chinese has no alphabet. Pinyin, the system that spells Chinese sounds, uses every Latin letter except v for Mandarin, plus ü. When people type, v often stands in for ü.
What is pinyin?
Pinyin is the official way to write Mandarin sounds with Latin letters. China adopted it in 1958. Children in mainland China learn it in their first months of school, dictionaries are sorted by it, and most people in mainland China type Chinese with it.
Can I read Chinese with pinyin only?
Not for long. Books, signs, menus and apps are written in characters. Pinyin helps you learn how a word sounds, and characters are what you read.
Are Chinese letters the same as Chinese characters?
Yes. When people say Chinese letters, they usually mean characters, called hànzì in Chinese. Each character is one syllable and usually has a meaning of its own.
Starting from zero? The free beginner roadmap takes you from the first sounds to your first real story in eight weeks.
