Also anyone have idea about the best way to learn it. or a class in Adelaide Australia?

Thanks

Pin yin is the phonetic transcription for Chinese calligraphy. It is not the calligraphy but helps you produce proper sounds for pronunciation. Just like when a non-English speaking person comes across a word in an English dictionary that is alien to him/her, he can still read it through the phonetic transcription e.g.

1. Bark (bäk) Sound: b+a (long vowel a)+k
2. Bar (bä) = sound b+a (long vowel a)

Luckily there is only one form of pinyin. Unlike English there are so many. But most non-american ESL students use Oxford, Cambridge or Daniel Jones phonetic transcripition.

Pinyin is similar to the English phonics. It is a method of teaching people how to pronounce Chinese/Mandarin letters. It is not a language by itself.

Pinyin is just the transcription of Mandarin caracters. Learning it will help you pronounce a word. But only learning it is useless if you don't learn the caracter that comes with it.

You won't be able to read a Chinese newspaper with only pinyin.

no, it's not even a language. Pinyin is how you pronounce a Chinese character.

pinyin is a form of writing mandarin is the official chinese language spoken by the majority of the northern han chinese peoples.

Pinyin is not chinese writing, it is writing the chinese language in the roman alphebet, to make it easier for westerners to learn chinese. They take the sounds of the chinese language and try to write them phonetically using the ABC letters we are familiar with. Although the phoenetics are not the same as english i is e and x is ss (or ssh).

The differnet parts of china speak differently but they can read the same characters when written in traditional chinese writing (not pinyin, pinyin is new). So they can't talk to each other but they can write letters to each other and understand.

As a weterner you have no choice but to learn pinyin and mandarin together. Because reading and speaking will most likely both be essential to your learning, unless you just learn to speak on the street. Any chinese class will teach you not only to write in pinyin but will show you traditional writing as well which is very artistic and used everyday in china today.