Free Chinese Tools

Translate and convert

Type Chinese, pinyin or English and get all three back on aligned lines: the characters, the pinyin with tone marks, and the meaning of every word. Or add pinyin to a text, switch scripts, read the Chinese on a menu or sign from a photo, or hear it read aloud.

Chinese to English Translator with Pinyin

Translate Chinese or Mandarin (Simplified or Traditional characters) into English and Pinyin, word by word, on three aligned lines in the original Chinese order…

Traditional Chinese to Pinyin & English

Translate Traditional characters (繁體) into pinyin with tones and the English meaning of every word.

English Translation

Translate English words into Pinyin and Chinese with word-by-word breakdown.

Pinyin Translation

Translate Pinyin with tone marks into English and Chinese characters.

Pinyin Without Tones

Translate Pinyin typed without tone marks into English and Chinese.

Pinyin Text Annotator

Paste Chinese text (Simplified or Traditional) to get ruby pinyin above every word, with a tone-marks toggle, meanings on hover, and copy/print output.

Traditional ⇄ Simplified Chinese Converter, Both Directions

Convert Chinese text between Simplified and Traditional script — word-aware conversion (头发→頭髮, never 头發), auto-detected direction, every changed character…

Translate Chinese from a Photo

Translate and listen to Chinese from your camera or an image.

Chinese Text-to-Speech Reader

Paste Chinese (or English) and hear it read aloud sentence by sentence in a natural neural voice, with the line being spoken highlighted so you can follow the text…

Dictionary and look-up

Find a word or a character, including one you cannot type, see how it is written, or copy the Chinese text out of an image.

Chinese Dictionary

The site's word pages — 4,995 headwords taken from the official HSK 1-6 lists, each at /dictionary/{pinyin}-{hanzi}, for example…

Chinese OCR

Free Chinese OCR that runs in the browser: drop in an image, paste a screenshot or take a photo and copy the Chinese text, simplified or traditional, horizontal or…

Search this site

One box for the whole site — every page, tool, quiz, game, article, story and lesson, plus every HSK 1-6 dictionary word and every travel phrase.

Handwriting Character Lookup

Draw a Chinese character with a mouse, stylus or finger and get ranked matches with pinyin, meaning, stroke-order animation and a link to the full dictionary entry.

Component Character Finder

Finds a Chinese character from the parts it is made of.

Stroke Order Animator

Animated stroke-order demonstrations for Chinese characters, with a short video on the five basic strokes (horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling and…

Radical Walker

Explores how Chinese characters are built, one step at a time.

Hanyu Pinyin Chart with Audio

Interactive table of every romanized Mandarin syllable, with audio for each of the four tones.

Pinyin Reference (Printable)

Printable Pinyin reference chart.

Bopomofo (Zhuyin) Chart and Converter

The 37 Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) symbols — 21 initials, 3 medials, 13 rhymes — each with the pinyin it corresponds to, an English pronunciation hint, and an example…

Chinese Measure Word Finder

Choose a noun or search by Chinese, pinyin or English; see one natural classifier, a counted phrase, the dictionary's reading and meaning, then practise ten…

Pronunciation and pinyin checks

Say a syllable or a sentence and see your pitch against the model, or check a line of pinyin.

Tone Pitch Mirror

Mandarin tone practice that listens.

Sentence Shadowing

Chinese shadowing practice at sentence length.

Mandarin Tone Sandhi Checker

Paste Chinese text or tone-marked/numbered pinyin and see two syllable-aligned lines: the citation reading dictionaries write and the connected-speech reading…

Pinyin Spelling Checker

Paste pinyin and see, syllable by syllable, whether it is real pinyin at all, which spelling rule was broken if it is not, and exactly where one syllable ends and…

Paste-in text tools

Paste Chinese you are reading or writing and get pinyin above it, audio, a difficulty level or a grammar check.

Chinese Text Difficulty Checker

Paste a Chinese text (simplified or traditional, up to 2,000 characters) and get the HSK level it reads at, how many new words in every 100 a reader meets at each…

Chinese Sentence Checker

Paste a Chinese sentence you wrote (simplified, up to 300 characters) and check it for the classic word-order and grammar mistakes English speakers make - time…

Chinese Reading Speed Test

Measures how fast a learner reads Chinese, in characters a minute.

Converters and keyboards

Tone marks, scripts, numbers, dates and romanizations, converted in your browser.

Pinyin Tone Mark Converter

Convert numbered Pinyin (ni3 hao3) to tone marks (nǐ hǎo) and back.

Pinyin Keyboard

Type Pinyin with tone-mark vowels (ā á ǎ à) online.

Chinese Number Converter — Write Any Number in Chinese

Type any number and get it in everyday Chinese numerals (一二三), the formal banker's characters (壹贰叁 dàxiě), and pinyin — or paste Chinese numerals to convert them…

Chinese Lunar Calendar Date Converter

Convert any Western date to its Chinese lunar (农历) date and back, with the 干支 sexagenary year, leap months (闰月) labelled, and the Gregorian dates of Chinese New…

Compare Romanizations: Wade-Giles, Yale, Bopomofo and Pinyin

Paste the same Chinese written in two romanization systems — Wade-Giles, Yale Mandarin, Bopomofo (Zhuyin) or Hanyu Pinyin — and see them aligned syllable by…

Chinese names

Get a Chinese name, check one you were given, and print a card for it.

Chinese Name Generator

Generates a Chinese name from an English name, either by sound (phonetic matching) or by meaning (characters chosen for what they say), with pinyin and a meaning…

Chinese Name Checker

Paste the Chinese name somebody gave you and get nine checks on it, every one of them a lookup rather than an opinion.

Chinese Name Practice Card

Type a Chinese name in characters and get a printable 田字格 practice card: every character built up one stroke at a time (new stroke in red, a dot where the pen…

Printables and downloads

Practice sheets, cut-out flashcards, a travel phrasebook and free PDF packs, with no sign-up.

Character Practice Sheet Generator

Printable 田字格 Chinese character worksheets, plus a short vertical video on why the grid's centre lines and diagonals show where each stroke lands.

Character Writing Practice

Practice writing Chinese characters with stroke-order guidance, plus why the practice box has lines (田字格 and 米字格) and a short vertical video on it.

Printable HSK Flashcards

Free cut-out flashcard maker — pick any HSK levels and print double-sided cards with the character on the front and pinyin plus English meaning on the back.

Printable travel phrasebook

Pick situations, print one sheet with characters, pinyin and English.

Show-the-driver address card

Renders a destination in characters big enough to read from the front seat.

Free Chinese PDF Downloads

The hub for four free printable PDF packs, each bundled from material already published on the site rather than written for the file: an HSK 1-3 vocabulary workbook…

Teacher Zone hub

Seven printable-activity generators for Chinese teachers, built from the official HSK 1-6 word lists or any pasted word list, each with an answer key.

Measure your Chinese

How many words you know, and what each HSK level actually covers.

Chinese Vocabulary Size Test

Estimates how many Chinese words a learner knows, measured against the 4,995 distinct words of the official HSK 1-6 lists.

Chinese Language Statistics

Original measurements of Chinese, computed from this site's own corpus rather than quoted from anywhere, with Data Detective, a guess-then-reveal game over the same…

Choosing what to study with

Apps, tutors and books compared, each with what it is missing.

The best way to learn Chinese, compared

A maintained comparison of 17 ways to learn Mandarin — structured course apps, dictionaries, spaced-repetition tools, graded reading libraries, handwriting…

Recommended Chinese learning resources

A browsable index of 37 physical resources worth owning, grouped into seven categories - HSK textbooks, graded readers, handwriting kit, dictionaries and audio…