Chinese reader with pinyin

Wanyu's Reader is a tool that turns any Chinese text — a song, an article, your show's subtitles — into a reading with pinyin: you paste it, Wanyu splits it into words, and you tap the ones you don't know to see their card. And whatever you tap can be saved into a deck and studied with spaced repetition. All inside the app, offline, with no accounts.

What does the Reader do, step by step?

You paste a Chinese text and the Reader does three things:

• It splits it into words. Running text — where Chinese puts no spaces between words — gets segmented into tappable units. You don't have to guess where one word ends and the next begins.
• It shows the card on tap. Tap a word and its card appears: the hanzi, the pinyin colored by tone, and a gloss in English and Spanish at once. Without leaving the text, without looking anything up elsewhere.
• You save it into a deck. From that same card, the word goes into a deck you later review with FSRS. What you read becomes your syllabus, not a saved-words list you never open again.

That last step is the bridge: reading stops being a loose session and starts feeding your spaced repetition. A word you trip over in a text today comes back tomorrow, right before you'd forget it.

Who is it for?

For anyone who already has things they want to read in Chinese and doesn't want to wait for someone to write custom readings for them. If you're studying HSK 3–6 and you consume real Chinese — song lyrics, social feeds, news, subtitles — the Reader lets you attack that material directly, with a net underneath: you're never stuck on a word, because you tap it and understand it. And if you'd rather start from vocabulary sorted by level, the Reader sits next to the full HSK library, with audio on every word and sentence.

How much does it cost?

The Reader is free. It's part of Wanyu's free engine, just like spaced repetition, import, and the audio in the HSK 1–2 library. There's no subscription and no “pro” version of the Reader: you pay once, and only for the curated HSK 3–6 vocabulary. The rest of why there's no fee is in no subscription.

What the Reader does NOT do

No fine print here. These are the lines the Reader doesn't cross, on purpose:

• No audio. The text you paste isn't narrated. Wanyu's audio lives on the fixed content — the library and the example sentences — not over what you paste. If you want stories narrated by native speakers, see the Wanyu vs Du Chinese comparison.
• No OCR. You paste text, not photos. The Reader won't read an image or a screenshot; it needs the text itself.
• Segmentation isn't perfect. Automatic splitting can cut a proper name or a rare word wrong. When it does, the app lets you re-split by hand, and the dictionary never invents: doubtful entries are flagged instead of slipping you a fake gloss.

What about my data?

The text you paste is yours and stays on your device. No cloud, no servers, no account: the Reader works entirely offline. What you read and the decks you create leave with you whenever you want, as a JSON file.

Try it yourself

The Reader is in Wanyu, free, from the very first moment. Download it and paste your first text.

More features: spaced repetition (FSRS) · HSK library · no subscription.