Chinese Transliteration
Paste Chinese and get pinyin with proper tone marks. The difference between this and a dictionary lookup is that it reads the sentence first, so characters with more than one reading come out right.
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Why dictionary converters get pinyin wrong
Most Chinese characters have exactly one reading, and converting those is a lookup. Any tool can do it, and they all do it correctly.
The trouble is the characters that have several. They are called 多音字, and they are not rare — they are among the most common characters in the language. 行 is háng in 银行 (bank) and xíng in 行走 (to walk). 乐 is yuè in 音乐 (music) and lè in 快乐 (happy).
A dictionary-based converter has to pick one reading per character, so it picks the most frequent and is simply wrong the rest of the time. Nothing in the character tells you which reading applies — only the words around it do. That is a context problem, which is exactly what a language model is for.
Where the difference shows
| You type | Correct | Common error | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 银行 | yínháng | yínxíng | 行 is háng in a bank |
| 音乐 | yīnyuè | yīnlè | 乐 is yuè in music |
| 睡觉 | shuìjiào | shuìjué | 觉 is jiào for sleep |
| 重复 | chóngfù | zhòngfù | 重 is chóng for repeat |
| 长大 | zhǎngdà | chángdà | 长 is zhǎng for growing up |
| 还书 | huánshū | háishū | 还 is huán for returning |
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Questions
What is Chinese transliteration?
Writing Chinese characters in the Latin alphabet according to how they are pronounced. The standard system is Hanyu Pinyin, which uses tone marks — nǐ hǎo — to show which of the four tones each syllable carries.
Why do other converters give the wrong pinyin?
Because many common characters have more than one reading, and which one is correct depends on the word it appears in. 行 is háng in 银行 and xíng in 行走. A converter that looks up characters one at a time cannot tell the difference, so it picks the more common reading and is wrong whenever the other one applies.
Does it handle both Simplified and Traditional?
Yes. Both are read the same way in Mandarin, so the pinyin is identical either way.
Is it free?
Yes, and it needs no account. Pasting text is free and unlimited. Uploading whole books or PDFs is part of the paid packages.