Hello Amjad, In Chinese there is no set of alphabet as you know it in English or other languages. There are rather so many characters *called hanzi in Mandarin*.There are about 60,000 characters, but most educated Chinese know about 5,000-6,000 characters. Each consists of one,2 or 3 syllables,which consist of several strokes ranging from 1 to 10 . You can't accordingly learn them all first and learn reading before you start learning the language. They will both go hand in hand . You can use the "pinyin "romanized system,where the latin alphabet (a,b,c..) is used to write Chinese characters. For example 你 好 = ni hao = how are you ( literally : you good ) The pinyin includes 4 tones that distinguish between the pronunciation of the words. This way you will be able to read and understand Chinese .At the same time you can learn the equivalent Chinese characters , a process that will probably take more time than learning the pinyin. But this is the suitable way to learn for a non-native Chinese.It will be very difficult for a non-native to memorize the pronunciation depending on the character, so going from pinyin to character is an agreeable transitive phase used to facilitate memorizing them. Good luck:)