Pinyin

The first step to Chinese is :

Pinyin

It's a tool for learners of Chinese, helping them to pronounce and learn the language's sounds. Pinyin also helps with typing and transcribing Chinese names and places. It's a tool for teaching pronunciation, typing, and texting. Zhou Youguang helped invent Pinyin, This makes it easier to learn how to pronounce Chinese words, and is credited with helping raise literacy rates in China. There are 21 initials and 38 finals in total in Chinese Pinyin. Some initials and some finals cannot be combined together. According to certain rules, all these initials and finals can actually form a total of about 400 syllables. In Chinese, there are four tones. The image below shows them :