Pinyin (Chinese phonetic alphabets, Chinese Pinyin) is the Romanized scheme of Chinese characters of the People's Republic of China. The symbols written according to this scheme is called Hanyu Pinyin. This Scheme for the Chinese Pinyin Alphabet is mainly used for the annotation of the phonetic pronunciation of Chinese mandarin. As the mandarin phonetic symbols of characters, it is a complementary tool to the pronunciation of Chinese characters, and as well an internationally recognized standard for Mandarin Latin transliteration.
Chinese Pinyin consists of 21 initials and 36 finals.

Chinese Mandarin is a tonal language. Each syllable has a tone, and different tones may cause different meaning of the characters. Tones refer to the levels of the syllable changes and the pitch changes which decide the nature of tones. Chinese tones can distinguish meaning (in fact, there are tone changes in all languages. But they never affect the meaning in the non-tonal language).
There are four tones in Chinese mandarin:

Please look at Help for how to input tones in the computer.

Chinese, the common language of the Han nationality used by most population in the world, is one of major languages around the world. Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects. It is known as Putonghua ( common language) in mainland China, guoyu ( national language) in Taiwan, and huayu ( Chinese language) in Singapore and Malaysia.
ChineseTones concentrates on teaching Chinese mandarin.
Chinese consists of lots of local dialects, like Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.

(The above areas are all dialect zones except green zones)

There are two sets of Chinese written language at present: Simplified Chinese is used in Mainland China; Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and some overseas Chinese communities. ChineseTones mainly focuses on teaching simplified Chinese.

As you can see, these are the same character 汉 in different fonts. The popular fonts are Song, Kai, bold, etc.

As same as English letters, Chinese characters are composed of strokes. The order of strokes observed in Chinese writing is called stroke order, and the amount of strokes is called stroke count.

Note: The character in the above picture is formed by the strokes surrounding it, in which the number refers to stroke order.

ChineseTones recommends learners to start from common radicals. Chinese characters are semantic characters which can be divided into single characters and compound characters. Compound characters are composed by two or two more single characters, for example, component “日” can form a lot of characters.
日——明 昨 星
月——阴、明、萌、脖、肚、胃

Common radicals

You must have noticed Pinyin of Chinese character. In fact, each character has a corresponding syllable. However, one syllable may correspond to more than one character.

2500 common Chinese characters make over one million phrases through compounding, subordination, etc.Thus, to recognize a certain amount of characters is the most important and fast approach to master Chinese language.

The rules to write in China include from top to bottom, from left to right, no space among character in one sentence (different from English), and punctuation is needed between two sentences (the punctuation in Chinese and English are not all the same).

If you want to input Chinese characters in the computer, please look at Help.