Pinyin, formally Hanyu - Term 13

Pinyin, formally Hanyu, is the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and may be used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into computers.

Hànyü means the spoken language of the Han people and pînyîn literally means "spelled-out sounds." When you type a pinyin character on your computer, "ma" for example, you may get up to 9 Chinese characters to chose the correct character you meant. What is displayed is the second row. You click on it and then you get the proper Chinese character you meant. See below: