Look up any character. Hear it, see every stroke.

What ToPinyin does

ToPinyin is a free toolkit for learning Chinese, built around three tools that work together. The pinyin converter turns Chinese text into pinyin with correct tone marks, including the right reading for polyphonic characters — characters that change pronunciation depending on the word they are in. The hanzi pages cover 3,726 common characters: each one shows its pinyin, meaning, stroke-order animation, character decomposition, and HSK level, plus the words it appears in. The worksheet generator turns your own word list into printable tracing grids, with an optional recall page, in A4 or US Letter size. Everything runs in your browser, and you can use every tool without an account.

Why tone marks and polyphones matter

Pinyin without tone marks is only half the pronunciation. The syllable "ma" can mean mother ( mā ), hemp ( má ), horse ( mǎ ), or scold ( mà ), depending on its tone — and getting the tone wrong is the fastest way to be misunderstood. Polyphonic characters add a second trap: the character 行 is xíng in 行走 (to walk) but háng in 银行 (bank), and no dictionary lookup of the single character alone can tell you which one is right. ToPinyin resolves readings from the surrounding words, not from the character in isolation, which is why its converter output is more reliable than a character-by-character lookup for real sentences.

How to use ToPinyin in three steps

First, paste Chinese text into the converter, or look up a single character from the search box above. Second, check the tone marks and stroke order: slow the animation down, trace the character on the practice grid, and read the example words to see how it behaves in context. Third, turn what you just learned into practice: add the words to a worksheet, print it, and write them by hand — handwriting is what moves a character from recognition into memory. If you are preparing for HSK, start from the HSK character levels and work through the characters level by level instead of jumping between random pages.

Who ToPinyin is for

ToPinyin is made for English-speaking learners of Chinese: self-learners working through their first characters, students preparing for HSK levels 1–3, and teachers who need printable practice sheets for a class. It is also useful for heritage learners who can speak some Chinese but never learned to read and write it systematically. The data behind the site comes from open sources — CC-CEDICT for definitions, Hanzi Writer data for stroke order, and published HSK lists — all credited on the license page.

Frequently asked questions