Pīnyīn

Chinese has a romanisation system called Pīnyīn, that expresses the complex Chinese characters (called Hànzì), with the English letters (plus tones). Unlike in English where pronunciation of syllables or whole words can vary (such as '读|read' and its past tense 'read', or even the town of Reading that my satnav always pronounces wrong), Chinese does not change the pronunciation of the Pīnyīn. So if a passage is fully written out in Pīnyīn, you could easily read it with no mistakes. However, I will point out in the next paragraph how this isn't as helpful as it sounds.