You won't find any news written in pinyin. Pinyin is as Laurence said mainly for teaching foreigners and children how to read a character. It is really important to start learning characters from day 1. In fact, you will get a lot further a lot quicker learning them from the start. If you are keen to read the news, I can recommend a site called The Chairman's Bao. http://www.thechairmansbao.com/ It is an online newspaper specifically written for people learning Mandarin. All the articles are organized by HSK level. You can highlight any word in the text to see its pinyin and meaning. Each article comes with a keywords list, grammar explanations and explains any idioms used. You can build a personalised word bank by saving words from the articles, and each article also has a recording of the article being read in a nice clear slow manner. ,

Part 4 As for Chinese dictionaries. the best dictionary by a clear mile is Pleco. It's an app you get for you phone, and it's amazing. There is no competition. Google translate is not that great, but it's not that bad either. For really rare words, I've found it to be quite good. It was the only dictionary that knew what 刘海儿 meant. Other useful things: There is a website called Arch Chinese http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_english_dictionary.html This website shows you how to write characters (the dictionary isn't entirely comprehensive and I have put in some characters in that the system didn't recognise, but it's good enough). You enter an English word, the Pinyin of a word, of the Chinese characters and up pops an animated diagram showing you the stroke order of the character. The more you watch these, the better you get at intuitively knowing how to write Chinese characters (I can know guess how to write almost all characters correctly, and I only know the rule "start from the top left and finish at the bottom right" and because I've watched these animations so many times). Pinyin chart - this shows you how to pronounce all syllables in Chinese. http://pinpinchinese.com/pinyin-chart/ 慢慢地中文 Slow Chinese - interesting, slowly read and clearly read Chinese podcasts about China. http://www.slow-chinese.com/podcast/ (these actually have Dutch translations, I think. I remember reading some of them in Dutch a while back). I hope this helps, and I wish you the best of luck in learning Chinese. Laurence

Part 2 As for Pinyin itself, it has some peculiarities. The "wen" sound of 文 in words like 中文 (Chinese language) is pronounced as "wun" and rhymes with sounds which are written as "dun" and others. This is an excellent article - http://www.foreverastudent.com/2013/06/pinyin-confusions.html As for easy reading material, I started with a series called 汉语风, which is translated as "Chinese Breeze". They come in three levels 250 characters, 500 characters and 750 characters. I bought all of them (you needn't do that haha) and read and listened to them (they come with CDs, which is good) again and again and again and again. That kinda got me started, and I suppose I'm thankful for that. Just a note, they are mind-numbingly boring. After that, I read a book called 中国文化二十讲 20 Lectures on Chinese Culture, published by Yale University Press. This is an old book written in traditional Chinese, but is aimed at people who don't speak Chinese well and who know squat about Chinese history (I actually found it really interesting). It's kind of a lower intermediate level. I read that again and again and again, too. After that, I read 小王子, a book I'm sure you are familiar with. It is, I think, the most translated Children's book on the planet. I know the story in English and loved it, which made reading it in Chinese easier. I had a friend record this for me and I listened to and read this goodness know how many times (I must have read the book from cover to cover 25 times through). That kind of got me to a level where I could start to battle my way through other books. The next thing I read was 玛蒂尔达 by 罗尔德·达尔 - Matilda by Roald Dahl. This was one of my favourite books when I was a kid, and again this made reading it easier. It's fairly simply written and the story, if you know it, is quite fun. There are some bizarre words in it, but the content and vocabulary is by and large useful and commonplace.

Part 3 After that, I read 查理和巧克力工厂, again by 罗尔德·达尔 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. I know the story to this and have seen the film, which again made reading it easier. This does contain some pretty esoteric words and a few odd names, but they come up time and time again so you get used to them pretty quickly. So long as you know 巧克力 (chocolate), 工厂 (factory) and 牙膏 (toothpaste), you'll find it alright. Besides these, I also am reading (and listening to) 格林童话 Grimm's Fairy Tales. These are surprisingly famous in China and you shouldn't find it too hard to get a copy. These are, again, fairly straightforward, although they do contain some odd words. However, as the stories are mostly fairly short and the same words come up again and again, you get used to them. 安徒生童话 - Anderson's Fairy Tales are also very famous in China and are written at a similar level. As for the news in China, I suppose 人民日报 - People's Daily is the most famous. I have never really read the news in Chinese as I'm not that interested, but here's the link http://www.people.com.cn/ If you simply google 新闻 (news) in Chinese then you be presented with a plethora of news webpages in Chinese. If you do want to read the news because you are interested in it, then I HIGHLY recommend getting something called a "reading tool". This is a piece of software that helps you read Chinese. A really good one is a programme called "Dimsum". It's essentially a kind of dictionary in "real-time". You can hover over words and it'll pop up with the translation in English. I used this to start with, but I found that I'd end up using it for every word and not really testing my actually reading skills. If you put some Chinese into Google Translate and Translate the Chinese into Chinese, underneath the box on the right side of the screen, you will see the Pinyin. You might find that helpful to start with.

Hey, I'm gonna mention a couple of things and perhaps give you a few recommendations, and then I'll try to answer some of your questions. 1) It's very, very difficult to get started speaking Chinese (I found it to be like this at least). If you want to start speaking very early, then go for it. I'm a proponent of people doing what they want to do, but I personally didn't do that. I found it very hard to speak, and even harder to understand what people were saying to me (which is why I worked on comprehension first). I would personally recommend working on a base of understanding before you start speaking, but as I said - each to their own. As for easy reading content, here is what I did - I started learning characters almost from day 1. And, to be able to read, you DO need to learn the characters - nothing is actually written in Pinyin. In China, Pinyin is merely system for showing people (mainly foreigners) how to pronounce the characters (and you will actually find that some people in Taiwan can't read Pinyin. This is becoming less common and most young people can read Pinyin, but I do have a Taiwanese friend who can't read Pinyin. She uses a system that they teach in Taiwan called BoPoMoFo. There is also a system in Taiwan called Zhuyin, but these are only common in Taiwan). I would recommend bulk learning the first few because they come up everywhere in every type of text. "The first few" is very ambiguous. Some people I know bulk learned 100, some 200, some 1000, some 2000, some more. It's up to you, I'd recommend AT LEAST 500. After that, I'd probably recommend learning the characters from what you read, and not learning them from lists. Incipiently, learning characters seems impossible. It's not and it DOES get easier. Stick at it.