My girlfriend is taking Chinese and needs to write in that language. Im pretty sure it can be done but I dont use Word.

Somebody know how its done?

On XP:

My Computer > control Panel > regional and language options > "Languages" tab > check off relevant packs to download and install

She should then be able to use unicode to type out Chinese characters.

http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/ime/pinyin/index.html

Better than MS's IME

I tried using the pinyin thing by google but it keeps coming up with an error...unfortunately the error is in Chinese and I can't figure out all the characters hah, I might just resort to looking up every word in the online dictionary and copy and pasting at this point

Ping Yin is the official Mandarin Chinese input method, there are many more but Ping Yin should be the friendliest (err.. the only friendly) to Roman Language speakers. The common folks in Mainland China love to use 搜狗, in Taiwan they use pheonetic or Tsang Jie (Chang Je, whatever).

Problem for Pin Yin is, I don't think it comes out with Traditional Chinese characters, instead all words came out first in Simplified characters and you have to look up the end of the list for traditional characters. If your girlfriend just started learning Chinese then it's most likely she's learning the Traditional Chinese characters.

Under Control Panel, you can go to Regional and Language Settings -> Keyboard settings -> Add. From there choose Chinese Taiwan (Traditional) to select a list of input methods. I suggest Tsang Jie because it's based on how the characters are looked instead of pronounced, easier for Chinese noobs if you can't pronounce every single words the "offiical" way. If you picked Chinese PRC (Simplified), Microsoft only provide Ping Yin input method. Ping Yin is based on the official pronounciation, but it's a lot easier cause the inputting keys are all based on the 26 English characters, adding 1-4 for the four intonations at the end.

She can take it slow, don't worry too much about typing in Chinese, but rather I'd suggest her to learn how to write with a pencil to begin with. That should help her memorize how each characters are written. Let me know if you need any helps.

PS: Btw if you saw the chinese error, print screen it and post it on photoshack or something and let me look at it for you.