Understanding the Chinese Language

Understanding Pinyin (BBC)

There are not PC key boards with Chinese characters available for general typing. The key board would have to be very large to hold the 1000’s of characters required.

While voice recognition and PDAs (mobile and Tablets) enables you to draw the Chinese characters using the standard Latin characters and Pinyin does enable Chinese people to type very fast in Chinese and creates the ability for none Chinese speakers to read Chinese. E.g. many of the road signs in China are written in Chinese and Pinyin.

The BCC website has a few well written pages on Pinyin which in very helpful getting started with the Chinese language.