The primary purpose of pinyin in Chinese schools is to teach Standard Mandarin pronunciation. Many in the West are under the mistaken belief that pinyin is used to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know, but this is incorrect as many Chinese do not use Standard Mandarin at home, and therefore do not know the Standard Mandarin pronunciation of words until they learn them in elementary school through the use of pinyin.

Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet, hence the pronunciation is relatively straightforward for Westerners. Pinyin vowels are pronounced similarly to vowels in Romance languages, and most consonants are similar to English. A pitfall for English-speaking novices is, however, the unusual pronunciation of x, q, c, zh, and z (and sometimes i) and the unvoiced pronunciation of d, b, g, j. More information on the pronunciation of all pinyin letters in terms of English approximations is given further in the following ar.

The pronunciation of Chinese is generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), the nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).