How to type Chinese on a computer or a phone

Typing Chinese looks like it should be hard, because Chinese does not have an alphabet. It is not hard. You type the sound of the character using the ordinary Latin letters on your keyboard, and the computer offers you the characters that match that sound. nihao becomes 你好 in two keystrokes' worth of effort.

Everything else is setup. So this page is mostly setup.

You almost certainly don't need a download

Search for pinyin input download or pinyin keyboard download and you will get a page of third-party installers, most of which you do not need. Windows 11, macOS, iOS and Android each include a Chinese keyboard as a built-in language option. Adding it takes about two minutes, costs nothing, and the software is maintained by the company that makes the operating system — which is the version you want if you are typing into a password box or a banking site.

This is worth saying clearly because the most common instinct is to go looking for something to install. If you have ever tried to download Chinese pinyin input to your laptop and ended up more confused than when you started, skip that step entirely. Add the language instead.

Third-party pinyin keyboards do exist, and a couple of them predict noticeably better than the built-in options. If after a few weeks you find yourself fighting the candidate list every other sentence, go shopping then. Not before.

How to type Chinese in Windows 11

Windows 11 is the platform people ask about most, and it is also the easiest — the Chinese keyboard comes bundled with the language, so there is no separate download step at all.

1. Open Settings and go to Time & language → Language & region.
2. Next to Preferred languages, click Add a language.
3. Search for 中文(简体，中国) — Chinese (Simplified, China) — and click Next.
4. On the next screen, make sure Language pack and Basic typing are ticked. Leave Set as my display language unticked unless you want Windows itself in Chinese.
5. Click Install. Microsoft Pinyin arrives with the language pack — you do not need to find or download an input method separately.
6. When it finishes, a language indicator appears in the corner of the taskbar, usually showing ENG. That is the switch you will use from now on.

Switching between English and Chinese

Press Win + Space. That cycles through your installed languages, and the taskbar indicator changes to 中 when Chinese is active. Type, and the characters appear.

Two settings in Microsoft Pinyin are worth turning on early. The first is the Simplified / Traditional toggle — Microsoft Pinyin can produce either, and if you are learning Simplified you will want to confirm which one is active rather than discovering three paragraphs later that you have been typing 漢字 instead of 汉字. The second is candidate count: the default shows a short list, and raising it to seven or nine makes it far easier to find unusual characters without scrolling.

How to type Chinese characters on Windows without the pinyin

Sooner or later you will meet a character you can read but cannot say — which means you cannot type it, because typing Chinese means typing the sound. This is the case where handwriting input earns its place.

Windows 11 includes a handwriting panel, and Microsoft Pinyin also accepts characters drawn stroke by stroke. Open the touch keyboard from the taskbar, or use the handwriting option in the input method's menu, and draw the character in the box. It does not need to be neat. The first few strokes are usually enough to narrow it down to a short list, and after that you pick from the candidates.

If you know the strokes but not the shape — that is, you know the character is written with three horizontal lines and a vertical, but not what it looks like as a whole — stroke input takes the strokes as a sequence of named types rather than as drawing. It is slower than pinyin and it is the technique of last resort, but it works. Our stroke order tool will show any character drawn stroke by stroke if you want to check the sequence before you try.

How to type Chinese on a Mac

macOS keeps input sources in the Keyboard settings, and adding one is a two-minute job.

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard.
2. Under Text Input, click Input Sources → Edit.
3. Click +, choose Chinese, Simplified, then Pinyin – Simplified.
4. Click Add. The input menu appears in the menu bar.

Control + Space switches between sources by default, and you can change that in the same panel. The candidate window follows the cursor, and you can select with the number keys or by clicking. One macOS-specific note: the spelling correction that runs over your English typing will also try to correct pinyin, which occasionally produces surprising candidates. Turning off autocorrect for the Chinese input source only is worth doing.

How to type Chinese on an iPhone or Android

On iOS, go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard, choose Chinese, Simplified, and select Pinyin. The globe key at the bottom left of the on-screen keyboard switches between your languages, and holding it lets you pick directly.

On Android with Gboard — which is what most phones ship with — open Gboard settings → Languages → Add keyboard, then Chinese (Simplified) → Pinyin. Also enable Handwriting while you are in there; it costs nothing and it saves you when you meet the character you cannot pronounce.

Mobile keyboards are actually the friendliest place to practise typing Chinese, because the candidate bar is wide, the characters are big enough to read, and the keyboard learns your vocabulary. If you are at the stage where you want to get faster at input, your phone is the better training ground.

How typing Chinese actually works

This is the part that people who grew up with an alphabet find counter-intuitive, so it is worth stating plainly. There is no Chinese alphabet to type letters from. What you type is pinyin — the Latin-letter spelling of the sound — and what appears is hanzi, the characters.

Type a syllable and the keyboard shows you every common character with that sound:

Because Mandarin has only around 400 distinct syllables but tens of thousands of characters, homophones are everywhere. That is why experienced typists type whole words and whole phrases rather than single characters — it gives the keyboard context to disambiguate. woxihuan is unambiguous; wo is not.

If you only need pinyin input online — for a quick lookup rather than daily writing — a browser-based input box or a converter does the job, and you can copy the characters out. But for anything you will do twice, install the keyboard properly. And if you are not yet sure how a syllable is meant to sound, our interactive pinyin chart plays every syllable in all four tones, which is the fastest way to get from "I think it is zh- something" to typing it correctly.

How to type Chinese in Microsoft Word

Chinese input inside Word is not a Word feature at all — it is the same operating system input method you have already set up, so there is nothing to configure in Word itself. Press Win + Space with Word focused and type, exactly as anywhere else.

There are two Word-specific things that do cause confusion, though.

Fonts: Word keeps two of them

Word separates the 中文字体 (East Asian font) from the 西文字体 (Latin font) for every run of text. Open Home → Font and you will see both settings. This matters when something looks wrong: if your Chinese text shows up as a row of empty boxes, the East Asian font assigned to it has no Chinese glyphs — set it to 等线, 微软雅黑 or 宋体 and the characters come back. If instead your English text suddenly looks like it is set in a Chinese newspaper, the Latin font has been switched to a Chinese one, which is the mirror image of the same problem.

Punctuation changes with the keyboard

With Chinese input active, Word produces full-width punctuation automatically — ， instead of ,, 。 instead of ., and the quotation marks become 「」 or “” depending on the input method. This is correct for Chinese and completely wrong for English. If you are writing a bilingual document, switch the keyboard back to English before typing the English half, rather than fixing it afterwards.

When Chinese won't type: five things to check

The failure modes are few and each has a specific cause. In rough order of how often they happen:

About "Chinese letters"

This question comes up often enough to answer directly, because it contains a false assumption. There is no such thing as Chinese letters, and no Chinese alphabet to learn. The characters are not letters — each one is a syllable-sized unit with its own meaning, and there are thousands of them rather than twenty-six.

When people ask how to type Chinese letters, what they usually mean is one of two things. Either they mean the pinyin spellings (ni hao, xiexie), which are just Latin letters with tone marks, and you type them on any ordinary keyboard. Or they mean the characters themselves, which you type by spelling the sound. Both are covered above, and neither involves a separate alphabet.

If it is the pinyin side that is still fuzzy — what zh or ü or x is supposed to sound like — that is a pronunciation question, not a typing one, and the pinyin chart is the right place to start.

Related: the interactive pinyin chart · Chinese tones test · how to learn Chinese from zero. New to the writing system? Start with is there a Chinese alphabet?