Chinese pinyin reader
Paste any Chinese text and read it with pinyin above each word. Hover or tap a word to see its English meaning and the characters it is built from.
Read native Chinese without stopping to look things up
Most Chinese reading practice stalls on the same problem: you recognise a character but cannot pronounce it, or you can read it aloud but not say what it means. A pinyin reader solves the first problem, and word-level definitions solve the second. Yomi does both at once: pinyin sits above the original characters, so your eyes stay on the real script, and meanings appear only when you ask for them.
Word-level pinyin, not character-by-character
Chinese is written without spaces, so a good reader has to work out where words start and end. Yomi segments text into words first, which means 钓鱼 is read as one word, diào yú, and polyphonic characters get the reading the context calls for rather than a default one.
Meanings from CC-CEDICT
Definitions come from CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese-English dictionary with roughly 124,000 entries. Hover a word on a computer or tap it on a phone to see the word, its pinyin and its English senses, along with each character and what it means on its own.
Good ways to use it
- Read news articles, Weibo or Xiaohongshu posts in the original.
- Work through HSK reading passages with pronunciation support.
- Decode menus, signs and forms from a photo while travelling.
- Prepare a text before class so you can read it aloud confidently.
- Check the reading of names and place names you have never seen.
Private and free
Chinese annotation runs entirely in your browser. The text you paste is not uploaded or stored on a server, there is no account, and the tool is free to use.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I add pinyin to Chinese text?
- Copy the Chinese text, paste it into the reader on the home page and press Read. Pinyin appears above each word immediately.
- Does it work with traditional characters?
- Yes. Both simplified and traditional Chinese are recognised, and words are grouped correctly in either script.
- Are tone marks included?
- Yes, pinyin is shown with tone marks such as mā, má, mǎ, mà rather than tone numbers.
- Can it read Chinese from a screenshot?
- Yes. Paste, drop or upload a screenshot and the Chinese text is extracted, then annotated with pinyin.
- Is there a limit on how much text I can paste?
- No practical limit for normal reading. Whole articles work fine, and annotation runs in your browser so nothing is queued or throttled.