TONEWICK · CHINESE, ILLUMINATED
Chinese you want to read. Tools that help you read it.
ToneWick · 聲芯 is a free Chinese reading tool that runs in your browser. Read an original short story or bring your own text, see its pinyin and tones, tap words for definitions, and listen to Mandarin.
Make Chinese easier to follow
- Choose your pronunciation display: pinyin with tones, unmarked pinyin, drawn tones alone, zhuyin (bopomofo), or characters alone.
- Make tones clear: blue for tone 1, gold for tone 2, green for tone 3, red for tone 4 and grey for the neutral tone. Shapes and text labels help when colour is not enough.
- Set comfortable sizes: characters, pinyin or zhuyin, tone shapes and website text have separate controls.
- Look up words: tap a word for dictionary entries, inspect its characters, correct an occurrence’s pinyin, and save vocabulary.
- Read either script: switch between simplified and traditional Chinese while retaining the imported source.
Listen at a pace you can follow
Three original starter stories have synthetic Mandarin recordings in both scripts, at natural and gentle speaking paces. Choose Voice speed → 0.80× before listening for the slower performance. Changes during playback preserve pitch. Optional tone motion follows individually timed characters; uncertain passages keep a still marker.
Device Mandarin voices are another option. Preparing new natural narration for personal text requires a separate access key and explicit consent. The reader and starter recordings need no account or key.
Bring your own reading
Paste Chinese, import a plain text file, or extract the selectable text from a PDF. Review the text, then read it with the same dictionary and pronunciation controls. Scanned PDFs need a separate OCR tool. Taiwan TBCL vocabulary levels from NAER’s April 2025 list are included, alongside the separate HSK 2.0 and HSK 3.0 lists. Soft word-level underlines stay independent of tone colors. TOCFL is a separate optional imported list.
A library on your device
Ordinary reading and text analysis happen in your browser. Saved books, settings and words stay in that browser profile. There are no analytics or advertising trackers. Export a library backup to protect your work; storage is not synchronized or encrypted. Optional voice processing has separate consent and retention rules.
Learning tools, with clear limits
Pinyin, segmentation, script conversion and audio alignment are machine-assisted and can be wrong. Displayed tones are dictionary tones; they do not reproduce every change in connected speech. Zhuyin comes from the same pinyin. Narration is synthetic, and the interface is currently in English.
Contact
Questions, feedback or a reading problem? Write to hello@tonewick.com. For a bug report, your browser name and a short example help. Your library stays in your browser unless you choose to share it.
Read the guide · Understand privacy and storage · See sources and licences