Extended keyboard set (as seen in the following image)
Scroll all the way down and enable the U.S. To enable it go into System Preferences then International then click on the Input Method tab. Extended keyboard instead of the standard U.S. (which is fantastic at typing pinyin to get the simplified characters) doesn’t support typing accent marks on romanized characters, but after a bit of digging I found that Mac OS X does it out of the box (why am I not surprised). So I needed to find a way to type pinyin with the correct tone marks (so I can print stuff out, and to get used to placing them properly). The tones are key to speaking Chinese well, he says. The class is being taught by Pan lǎoshī (潘老师), and he stresses the use of pinyin and hitting the proper tones (as I am sure most teachers do). I had my first Chinese class on Friday, and it was fun.
