Chinese is a mysterious language, at least from the looks of it in the beginning. You're first introduced to a plethora of blocky "pictures" and then you realize they can mean different things individually or in combination.
The most important aspect of Chinese is that you try and learn to "recognize" the individual characters, having said that, the sounds and pronunciation of the individual characters are actually composed of an entirely different system from learning the characters.
There are two major systems in the Chinese world for pronunciation, the first kind is "Hanyu Pinyin", this system is primarily used in Mainland China, it is an easier approach for foreigners to learn Chinese because it's based on the English alphabet.
The second type is Zhuyin, or Bopomo, this system is used primarily in Taiwan and is composed of 37 letters, it's harder to read but the pronunciation guidelines, once learnt, can be more accurate than the Hanyu pinyin variety.
This is an example of Zhuyin: ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ and the associated characters are 注音符號
The same set of characters with it's Hanyu pinyin equivalent would look something like this: zhùyīnfúhào
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