Chinese text-to-speech reader
Paste any Chinese passage and hear it one sentence at a time, with the line being spoken highlighted so your eyes stay on the characters. Slow it to 0.5×, repeat the sentence you missed, then run the whole thing at full speed.
Your text
Listen
Your sentences will appear here. Click any one of them to start reading from there — with Repeat sentence on, it loops that sentence instead.
How to get listening practice out of it
Reading Chinese and understanding spoken Chinese are close to separate skills, and the gap is almost always in the same direction: you can read a paragraph you cannot follow when someone says it. The fix is not more vocabulary — it is hearing text you have already understood, until the sounds attach to the characters you know.
- Read it silently first. Look up anything you do not know before you press play.
- Play the whole passage at 1× with your eyes on the highlight. Do not stop.
- Go back to the sentences that slipped past. Click one, turn on Repeat sentence, and let it loop while you say it along with the voice.
- Play it again at 1× or 1.25× without looking. The sentence you looped is the one you will hear cleanly this time.
0.5× is for picking a syllable apart, not for practice. Spend most of your time at normal speed — slow audio trains you to understand slow audio, which is not what anyone speaks.
Text worth listening to
The tool reads what you give it, so the passage matters more than the player. Text at your level, that you have already read once, is worth ten times a news article you cannot follow.
- Graded Chinese readers — 41 stories with pinyin and tap-to-define, sorted by level. Copy one in and listen to it after you have read it.
- Travel phrases by situation — short, useful lines that are worth being able to hear at full speed before you need them.
- Grammar examples — hearing a pattern ten times in ten sentences is how it stops being a rule and starts being a reflex.
- Your own messages. A WeChat thread you half-understood is the most motivating listening material you will ever find.
Frequently asked questions
Can I hear Chinese text read aloud for free?
Yes. Paste up to 1200 characters and press play — no sign-up, no per-user quota and nothing to install. The voice is a neural Mandarin voice, not a robotic one.
How do I slow the audio down?
The speed slider runs from 0.5× to 1.5×. It re-times the recording in your browser, so the voice and the tones are unchanged — what you hear at 0.7× is the same pronunciation you get at full speed, just with more room between the syllables.
Does it read traditional characters?
Yes — pick Chinese — Traditional and the passage is read in Taiwanese Mandarin. Auto-detect decides between Chinese and English by itself, but always chooses the simplified voice for Chinese: the two scripts share far too many characters to tell apart from a short paste. If you need to convert between them, use the Simplified ↔ Traditional converter.
Why is my text split into so many pieces?
Each sentence is spoken as its own clip so you can click, repeat and follow along at the sentence level. Anything longer than 100 characters is split again at a comma, which keeps every clip short enough to load quickly on a phone.
Can I get the pinyin as well?
Not here — that would be a second copy of the same tool. Put the passage through the pinyin annotator for pinyin above every character, or the Chinese to pinyin translator for a word-by-word breakdown with meanings, then come back here to listen to it.
Is my text saved?
No. Splitting happens in your browser, and the sentences you play are sent to the speech service only to be turned into audio. The site has no accounts, so there is nothing for it to be attached to. See the privacy policy for the detail.