Pinyin to Chinese: type pinyin, pick characters

How typing Chinese with pinyin works

Pinyin writes the sounds of Mandarin with Latin letters: 你好 is nǐ hǎo, 中国 is Zhōngguó. It is also how most people in mainland China type. A pinyin input method lets you type the sound on an ordinary keyboard and then shows the characters that match, so that you can pick one. This page is a small one that runs in your browser.

Type nihao and the first suggestion is 你好. Press Space to take it, press a number to take another one, or tap it. A short phrase works too: woainizhongguo gives 我爱你中国. What you pick collects in the box next to it, ready to copy.

Why you have to choose

Mandarin has few syllables and many characters. Without tones there are only about 400 different syllables, so each one is shared by many characters: shi alone can be 是, 时, 事, 十, 市 and dozens more. The suggestions are ordered by how often each word is used, and each one shows its pinyin with tone marks, so you can tell 买 mǎi (to buy) from 卖 mài (to sell). Longer input is easier to get right: shi is a guess, laoshi is almost certainly 老师.

What it is good for, and what not

Use it for a word, a name or a short phrase when you have no Chinese keyboard at hand. Three things to know:

• It ranks every word by how common it is and does not read the rest of your sentence. A long sentence typed in one go can come out with a wrong character that sounds the same: woyaoyibeikafei gives 我要已被咖啡 where 我要一杯咖啡 (I would like a cup of coffee) was meant. Typed in pieces it comes out right: woyao, then yibei with 一杯 picked from the list, then kafei.
• It does not learn. Nothing is stored, so a word you pick often does not move up the list.
• Its dictionary has about 48,000 words and 7,000 characters. Names of people, small places and new words have to be put together one character at a time.

It is not a replacement for the keyboard built into your phone or computer. That keyboard looks at the words around the one you are typing, remembers what you write and types straight into your apps.

How to switch on the pinyin keyboard

iPhone, iPad, Mac and Windows have a pinyin keyboard built in, and on Android it is part of Gboard. The names of the menus change a little between versions:

• iPhone and iPad: open Settings, then General, Keyboard, Keyboards, and add a new keyboard. Choose Chinese, Simplified and then Pinyin. The globe key switches between your keyboards.
• Mac: open System Settings and go to Keyboard. Add an input source there, choose Chinese, Simplified and then Pinyin. Switch with the input menu in the menu bar.
• Windows: open Settings, go to Time & language and add Chinese (Simplified) as a language. It comes with the Microsoft Pinyin keyboard. The Windows key together with Space switches between keyboards.
• Android: most phones use Gboard. Open its settings, choose Languages, add a keyboard and pick Chinese (Simplified) with the Pinyin layout. Phones with another keyboard have a similar setting.

The word list comes from the pinyin keyboard of the Android Open Source Project, used under the Apache License 2.0. The tones were added with pinyin-pro and the Traditional forms with the OpenCC tables. Sources and licences

The other way round: from characters to pinyin

This tool turns pinyin you know into characters. HanCam goes the other way. For Chinese that you cannot type or copy, on a sign, a menu or a page of a book, it reads the characters with the camera of your iPhone or iPad and shows them with pinyin and tone marks, and the meaning. The meaning is in your phone's language where Apple's on-device translation offers it, and in English otherwise.

Questions and answers