Hello Marissa, You go to the regional and language options and add "Chinese language" to your language bar, By switching the bar to "Chinese", you will be able to type characters by inserting the pinyin using romanized alphabet .For example you will be typing "Zhongguoren" and 中国人 will appear on your screen. Sometimes many characters will appear due to different tones; assuming that you know every tone and its corresponding character ,you will click the right one to appear. For example if you type "shi" you might mean 是 ( shi4 = is ,to be ) or (十 shi2 = 10) etc , so you will get several characters and you will choose the right one for the context . 她是中国人的 in this context you mean (shi = to be ,is) and you choose the corresponding character 是 . :)

hi,nice to see you.i come from china.could i help you to learn mandarin?add my skype id:"shelvinglee" to learn mandarin.

We type in "pinyin" based on latin letters. There are many IME ,(i.e.Input Method Editor ) in China .the most populate Chinese input softwares are Google Chinese Input Method and Sougou IME...in fact ,They support to input both Chinese and English intelligently ... If interested ,download here " http://dl.google.com/pinyin/v1/GooglePinyinInstaller.exe " or '' http://ime.sogou.com/dl/sogou_pinyin_41d.exe " The second one is more popular and allow you input English with spelling indication after cliking ctrl +shift+ E.....