Whereas the Japanese romaji input method predominates for Japanese, there are a number of different approaches available for Chinese.

Pinyin was introduced with Simplified Chinese, and is typically used in the same geographical areas, ie. Mainland China and Singapore.

It is essentially equivalent to the romaji input method. The numbers you see in the example above indicate tones. This dramatically reduces the ambiguity of the sounds in Chinese.

One of the problems of pinyin is that the transcription is based on the Mandarin or Putonghua dialect of spoken Chinese. So to use this method you need to be able to speak that dialect.