Chinese teachers and educators almost unanimously agree that Chinese must be learned with Chinese characters, but most are also using the Pinyin Chinese alphabet system to help facilitate learning. While the Pinyin alphabet shouldn’t be used exclusively to learn Chinese or as a writing system, it can definitely help students with memorizing and perfecting pronunciation.

Now that we’ve covered how to explain Chinese characters to kids and why the written Chinese character system is not an alphabet, let’s take a look at a true alphabet that can be used for learning Chinese — the Pinyin alphabet.

Pinyin (拼音）is made up of “initials” and “finals,” which are clusters of letters. Add an initial to a final and you’ve got a complete word sound (although there’s no way to know which word it is without any context — which is why Chinese characters are the only real way to write Chinese).

One of the easiest ways to get a feel for how pinyin is pronounced is by playing our app, which includes words in pinyin and immerses the player into hearing the sounds without having to think hard about it.

Here’s a rough guide to pronouncing initials, based on English approximations based on Wikipedia’s list:

Got it? Now here’s a guide to pronouncing the end half of words, the finals:

It can be quite exhausting and overwhelming to try to learn Pinyin from charts like this, which is precisely why we’ve made the Chinese Fridge game app. It’s far easier and more enjoyable to see the pinyin writing and hear it repeatedly as you match word game pieces with their respective meanings.

Remember above all else that Pinyin is merely an alphabet used to help teach phonetics, but can’t teach Chinese writing, nor can it be used as a substitute for writing Chinese. The best way to learn is to use both pinyin alongside Chinese characters, as pretty much every school and class in America does these days, from preschool to college.