There are really two separate skills hiding in this question. One is typing romanized pinyin with its diacritics — — for notes, Anki cards, and teachers. The other is typing Chinese characters, which paradoxically also uses pinyin: you type the letters without tones and pick the character you mean. Learners usually need both, in that order, and the second one is easier than the first.
iPhone and iPad: long-press the vowel
On any iPhone, in any app, press and hold a vowel on the English keyboard and a row of accented variants pops up — keep holding, slide to the one you want, release. This covers the common marks immediately: from a, from e, from i, and so on. The two awkward characters are the third tone's caron () and , which some iOS versions include in the long-press row and some do not; if yours does not, slide your finger along the row slowly — the full set is often wider than the screen — or use the fallback method at the end of this guide. iPads with hardware keyboards work the same way on the on-screen keyboard, and holding a key on most external keyboard setups triggers the same popup.
To type characters, add the Chinese pinyin keyboard once: Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → Chinese, Simplified, Pinyin. Then the globe key toggles between English and Chinese, and becomes a candidates bar offering 你好. You never type tones in this mode — the IME lists candidates for every tone and you pick by eye.
Android: long-press on Gboard, or any keyboard's accent row
On Gboard and most modern Android keyboards the trick is identical: long-press a vowel, slide to the accented variant. The available set varies slightly by keyboard and locale, so check once which of your keyboard offers. If your default keyboard is sparse, Gboard is free and its long-press rows are generous; Samsung's keyboard works the same way. For character typing, add Chinese (Simplified) Pinyin from Gboard's languages list — same globe-toggle flow as iOS, same no-tones candidate picking. A small settings gem on both platforms: enable the nine-key (T9-style) pinyin layout only if you already like nine-key typing in your own language; the full QWERTY pinyin layout is far easier for learners from English.
Mac: press-and-hold, or the ABC Extended layout
macOS gives you two tiers. The quick one is identical to the phone: hold a letter key and pick the accented variant from the popup — on a MacBook this covers comfortably, with the caron row available on recent macOS versions. The thorough one is a dedicated input source: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add ABC Extended. With it active, Option-key combinations become dead keys — for example Option-e then a produces , Option-` then a produces — and the full pinyin set including and becomes available without any popup. It takes one afternoon to memorize the four or five combos you actually use; keep a sticky note for the first week. For characters, add the macOS Chinese, Simplified pinyin input source in the same place.
Windows: the hardest platform, and the workarounds
Windows is honest bad news: the standard US keyboard has no accent popup, and the popular US-International layout only provides dead keys for acute, grave, circumflex, and umlaut — which leaves (macron) and above all (caron) unreachable. The realistic options, in increasing effort: use the touch keyboard's long-press (works on tablets and touch laptops, same slide-to-choose gesture); install a third-party pinyin keyboard layout or an AutoHotkey script that maps sequences like to ; or use the browser-based approach below, which needs no installation at all. Microsoft's own Chinese pinyin IME is excellent — but for characters, not for tone-marked pinyin text.
The zero-setup fallback: type characters, convert to marked pinyin
Here is the method that works on every device with no setup, and it is worth internalizing because it also doubles as reading practice. Type the characters with any pinyin IME — phone or computer, Chinese keyboard or handwriting — then paste them into the ToPinyin converter and copy out perfectly marked pinyin. You type , choose 我喜欢喝茶, convert, and get with every tone in textbook position, ready for a flashcard. Because the readings come from a dictionary, polyphones like 行 come out right (, not ) — something no keyboard dead-key method can promise. This is also the honest answer to "how do I type ǚ": you type the character and let the converter spell it.
Common annoyances, and their fixes
Three small problems account for most of the frustration once your keyboards are set up. First, autocorrect fights your pinyin: English autocorrect will mangle into "injao" or capitalize mid-word. Fix: after typing a pinyin word autocorrect has ruined, tap the version you actually typed in the suggestion strip (iOS) or backspace and retype slowly once (Android learns your vocabulary); within a week, most keyboards stop correcting the syllables you use often. Second, the globe key dance: switching keyboards dozens of times a message gets old, so learn the shortcuts — on iOS, hold the globe key for a picker, or enable "continuously" typing with the spacebar candidate trick once you have a Chinese keyboard; on Windows, toggles between Chinese and English inside the Microsoft IME, which is faster than any mouse trip to the taskbar. Third, typing pinyin inside a Chinese IME by accident: you meant to send English -style pinyin and characters came out. Every platform has an English-within-IME mode — press the shift toggle again, or on phones just switch back — but honestly, sending the character is usually what you wanted anyway.
Tone numbers: the format that needs no special keyboard
Tone numbers — , with 0 or nothing for neutral tone as in or — exist precisely because of the keyboard problem, and they remain the input format for many flashcard apps, dictionary searches, and classroom conventions. When to prefer them: typing on an unfamiliar or locked-down machine; entering data into Anki or Pleco, which accept numbers and render marks; and any context where ASCII is simply safer, like file names and spreadsheets. When not to: anything a human reads for pronunciation practice — the mark on the vowel () is read fluently, the trailing number () is decoded. The converter outputs both formats with one click, so you can read the marks and export the numbers. If the numbers themselves are mysterious, the tones guide explains what 1–4 map to in pitch.
From pinyin to full characters
Once tone-marked typing is sorted, character typing is a small step, because you already know the letters. The workflow on every platform: switch to the Chinese pinyin keyboard, type the syllables without tones (), and select the intended word (中文) from the candidate bar — by tapping, or by its number key on computers. Two conventions matter: the IME expects where pinyin writes (type for 绿, -words via — the spelling logic is in the spelling rules guide), and apostrophes are usually optional when typing ( shows both 西安 and 先 as candidates, so pick rather than type ). Typing characters this way is itself excellent review: every message forces you to recall pronunciation, and the candidate bar quietly drills you on homophones — the same characters you would meet in the dictionary's reverse pinyin index.