chinese pinyin is a form of phonetic symbol.pinyin is used to help you pronounce chinese words.certainly people use mandarin in spoken and written chinese ,not pinyin.chinese pupils use pinyin to prononce more words.and.I, always use pinyin to type chinese words.you can not find any pinyin in books or on chinese newspapers.magzines.TV....（这才叫汉语）

Hello vivid, They learn and use both. They communicate among each other using Characters and read the papers in Characters. They use the pinyin more to communicate with foreigners speaking or learning Chinese. As a Chinese learner you will need to learn both. Learning pinyin will help you memorize the words, differentiate their tones and pronounce them ,simulatenously you will be learning the Characters.

according to my experience as foreign student! i think chinese pople use chinese characters! i have not seen any chinese using pinyin. they only use in typing in computer! and pinyin are used to teach foreigners because foreigner cant start directly from pinyin! [if so then they will give up to study chinese..i am sure..because it will beboring for them] and little chinese kids are also tought pinyin in primary!

There are two systems of Chinese characters, which are used when we want to write something down:traditional and simplified. These are the real Chinese "words". In mainland, simplified Chinese characters are polular, while in Taiwan and Hongkong what you see are traditional. Pinyin is another system introduced in 1958 that helps the Chinese beginners(both foreigners and the Chinese kids) to pronounce the characters.(no matter it is traditional or simplified) Mandarin Chinese is the speech of officials and what most of the Chinese speak or can understand, if you know there are so many dialects in China... So i think it is better for you to learn Mandarin Chinese(not a dialect ).And at the beginning Pinyin will surely help you with the pronunciation. If you are not just satisfied with listening and speaking , you also want to write in Chinese, the learning of the Characters is also full of fun.

Hi There When I was in China I didn't see much pinyin. It's more like training wheels that people use to learn the language, but not something that native speakers use much. There is very little English around EVERYTHING is in Mandarin characters. (That was 5 years ago) Things might have changed now, but I don't see why they would.