Watch The Animation Typing Characters

Romanized Chinese is called Pin1 Yin1 (literal translation: "spell sounds"). There are two ways to write pinyin. One is using numbers to show the 4 tones of Mandarin. The other is using accents to show the tones.

Two things that you may want to do on your computer are: 

1) type in numbered pinyin and convert it to accented pinyin

2) type in numbered pinyin and convert it to hanzi (Chinese characters).

To convert from numbered pinyin to accented pinyin, try a website conveter such as: 

http://www.pinyin.info/unicode/marks3.html

or try Zhengsheng Zhang's Word Macro method as listed on Tim Xie's website:

http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/PINYIN/pinyin.htm

To learn how to enable your Windows machine to type Chinese characters (by converting from numbered pinyin) watch this "Typing Characters" animation.