Chinese has no alphabet. There is no set of ~26 letters you can learn and then read the language - that is the single most common false assumption beginners bring, and correcting it early saves real confusion.
What Chinese has instead
The unit is the character: one per syllable, each carrying meaning. 学 = learn, 生 = student/life, so 学生 = student. About 3,000 characters cover literacy; they are built from a smaller kit - a few hundred radicals and components that hint at meaning (氵=water, 心=heart) or sound (青 hints qīng in 清情晴请).
So how do you write the sounds?
Two auxiliary systems exist - neither is used by natives to write text:
- Pinyin (拼音) - the mainland's romanization: xuésheng with tone marks. It is how you type, look up words, and annotate pronunciation. Learn it in week one; the pronunciation guide walks it.
- Zhuyin/Bopomofo (注音) - Taiwan's 37-symbol phonetic alphabet: ㄒㄩㄝˊㄕㄥ. Taiwanese children read it before characters, and Taiwan input methods use it. Comparison: pinyin vs zhuyin.
Can you learn Chinese without characters?
For spoken survival, pinyin alone works. But nothing natives write - menus, messages, subtitles, signs - is in pinyin, and homophones make pinyin-only text ambiguous fast (shì has dozens of characters). Characters are not decoration; they are the writing system.
The good news
No alphabet also means no spelling. Every character is pronounceable from its components once you know the kit - and unlike English spelling, the system is regular enough that literate speakers guess new words' readings from their parts.
Common questions
Does Chinese have an alphabet like English?
No. The written unit is the character (about 3,000 for literacy), built from radicals and phonetic components. Pinyin and zhuyin are sound-notation systems used for learning and typing, not everyday writing.
How many letters are in the Chinese alphabet?
None - but the closest analogs are the ~214 traditional radicals (meaning components), the ~26 pinyin letters, and the 37 zhuyin symbols.
Is pinyin the Chinese alphabet?
Pinyin is a romanization - a way to write Mandarin sounds with Latin letters, including tone marks. Mainland children learn it before characters; adults use it mostly for typing.