The forms of written Hanzi have little or no connection with the sounds of speech. For centuries this has allowed China, in spite of its vast size and wide variety of mutually incomprehensible dialects, to have a single unifying system of written communication.

Of course, for students the obvious drawback is that Hanzi give you virtually no clue as to how words should be pronounced. To deal with this issue, the Chinese developed a system called Hanyu pinyin, which loosely translates as "phonetic representation". Pinyin characters basically look like english letters, but with some special accent-like marks used to represent the tones of Mandarin Chinese.

Since LanguageDoctor.com helps you learn the correct pronounciation of Chinese words, you need to verify that your browser can display pinyin correctly:

kɑ̄ishǐ

As before, if the contents of the two boxes look about the same, your browser is set up correctly. Pay special attention to the left-hand box, making sure that the "hat" over the final "i" is pointing down, and that the "a" is the same height as the other lower-case letters.

You will also use pinyin as a way of entering Hanzi when you answer some of the exercises, but that will be explained later.

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