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TONEWICK · CHINESE, ILLUMINATED

Your guide to reading with ToneWick

Open the Chinese reader and start with a sample story, or use Import for your own text. The reader works with simplified and traditional Chinese.

Find your controls

Playback, voice speed, script, pronunciation and the size controls are together above your text. Choose Translation, Settings or Hidden in the panel selector beside playback. Translation and settings share the right-hand column; the panel stays visible as you scroll through a long document. Hidden removes the entire column for full-width reading. Your choice is remembered. On a phone, panels start hidden; the selected panel opens above the article, with a compact, scrollable translation card. Opening settings suspends automatic following so you can explore controls at your own pace.

Follow bite-sized passages in English

Tap anywhere in a sentence to go to it: it highlights, its English appears, and any narration stops so you can read and look up words in peace. Press Listen to hear it from its beginning. Press and hold a word for about half a second (a ring fills around it) to open its dictionary entry instead; holding never moves the narration. You can also choose ▹ beside any passage to see its Chinese and English in the translation panel. While narration plays, the Chinese highlight and English automatically follow each new passage. Choosing a marker or the previous/next arrow moves narration to that passage. If playing, it starts there immediately; if paused or stopped, it waits for Listen. Ordinary Pause/Resume keeps your exact position. A soft wash in your room tint marks the current passage, including wrapped lines. When stopped, Follow reading again returns to following your reading position. Opening a word by pressing and holding, or with the keyboard, never moves the narration. Use Hide or choose Hidden to remove the translation panel completely.

Device voices speak whole sentences continuously while translations follow the voice’s reported word positions. Translation passages do not introduce extra speech pauses. If a voice provides no word positions, following is limited to sentence starts; choose a voice with word timing for precise following. Recordings seek using supplied character timing where available; a recording with only broader timing starts at its nearest available earlier point. Playback still covers the current reader page.

Starter English is ready immediately. For imported text, choose Translate this text and allow translation for this text. Translation is free, with a shared capacity limit and no access key. Results are saved on this device when remembering is enabled. Pause translation stops new requests; hiding the panel also cancels its pending request.

Short sentences stay together. Longer sentences split into bite-sized passages at commas, semicolons and other natural pauses. Text with little punctuation uses word boundaries where available. Brief lead-ins stay with a nearby clause, and no source text is discarded. The model translates each passage separately and may miss names, idioms or context from surrounding passages. Press and hold a word to compare dictionary meanings. How optional translation handles text.

Read newspapers and Chinese websites

Paste article text through Import, or import a selectable-text newspaper PDF and review its extraction. Turn on Reading settings → Names & chengyu. Idioms are kept together and marked ◇; press and hold one for the full dictionary definition, including figurative senses. A word is not called a chengyu merely because it has four characters.

Names have a ⌑ marker and a neutral rule beneath them. Dotted rules indicate possible people, places or organizations detected locally. These hints can miss new names or mistake ordinary words for names. Press and hold a word and open Correct a name or idiom label: enter the complete expression, choose its kind, and apply it to this text. Ordinary word removes a mistaken name; Automatic removes your correction. Save the text to keep corrections; they travel with library backups. Tone colors and level underlines keep their separate meanings.

Adjust tone size

  1. In the toolbar, choose Pronunciation → Pinyin + tones, Zhuyin, or Tones only.
  2. For separate shapes above pinyin or zhuyin, choose a Tone appearance option with drawn tones in Reading settings.
  3. Use the toolbar’s single Tone size − / + control to resize drawn tones from 16 to 80 pixels.

Pinyin size (or Zhuyin size) changes the phonetic text independently, from 12 to 72 pixels. Tones only displays the large drawn contours. With drawn tones enabled, pinyin and zhuyin have no second set of tone marks. Small pronunciation marks remain an alternative appearance. Characters have their own 24–128 pixel setting. Website size ranges from 70–180%. Below 100%, compact mode also reduces Chinese, pronunciation, tone drawings, panel text and spacing, while keeping your individual size choices. The translation column becomes narrower. Size buttons retain usable, stationary targets while you adjust them. During playback, the same Pause/Resume, Stop and speed controls stay at the top edge. Scrolling manually switches off Follow text; check it beside playback to resume automatic following.

Use Pronunciation → Characters only to hide pronunciation, or press P to hide and restore your previous mode. Hidden layers disable their size controls. Tone appearance → No tone cues removes tone marks, shapes, colours and motion together. Level underlines remain independent.

Listen to slower Mandarin

  1. For a starter story, stop any current playback.
  2. Set the toolbar’s Voice speed to 0.80×, then select Listen. Use the slider or its arrow keys for precise steps.
  3. This selects a separately generated, gently spoken recording. It plays without stretching the normal-speed recording.

The Voice speed slider ranges from 0.5× to 1.5×. During a recording, adjustments preserve pitch and the character guide follows the same audio clock. The current performance stays loaded while playing or paused; a new stopped Play can select the other starter pace. Device voices apply a speed change after the current and already queued sentence, without replaying them; their quality depends on your device.

Stop and the end of a recording release its audio output and clear the platform playback state. Listen can replay the cached recording without another download. Pause retains the exact audio position. Your browser controls the tab’s speaker badge and may keep it briefly after sound stops.

For your own text, Reading settings → Voice → Prepare natural narration → Speaking pace offers Gentle, Natural and Brisk. On iPad and iPhone, Listen opens preparation automatically for imported text. Allow the displayed page text and choose Create this page’s audio. No account or connection code is needed. After preparation, close the panel and press Listen. Text consent is required for every preparation. Each browser can prepare up to six pages per hour and thirty per day, with additional shared-network and service limits. A full page can take a few minutes. Use basic device voice instead is available in the same panel. Starter recordings need neither.

Taiwan vocabulary levels

Choose Word-level underlines → Taiwan · TBCL in Reading settings. New readers start with NAER’s April 2025 TBCL word list. Its original starred sublevels are preserved. Thin, rounded underlines show the level color; press and hold a word for its exact label. HSK 2.0 and HSK 3.0 remain separately available. Saved selections are retained.

Understand tone movement

Tone motion is optional and off by default. Enable Animate the spoken character under Reading settings → Tones. Only a character with individual timing moves, along the same contour as its drawn tone: level, rising, dipping then rising, or falling. The movement stays inside a small area around the character and never reverses back during the spoken interval. A single frame follows the current timed character; when a device supplies only word boundaries, the guide follows those word events. All starter characters have individual audio positions; some recovered positions are approximate. An unsupported device voice or unalignable recording keeps a still marker. Pausing or stopping clears movement. Your device’s reduced-motion preference takes priority.

Colours and shapes represent dictionary tones: first tone is level, second rises, third dips, fourth falls, and the neutral tone has a small mark. These are illustrations, not a measured pitch trace. Connected Mandarin can change dictionary tones; the display is not a complete account of tone sandhi.

Read your own text

Use Import to paste Chinese, open a plain text file, or paste an article’s web address and choose Open article: ToneWick fetches that one page, keeps the headline and story, drops menus, captions and advertising, and credits the paper with a link back. Check the text before reading; pages that need a sign-in or are built entirely by scripts cannot be opened this way, so copy their text instead. For PDFs with selectable text, extract and review the text before reading. Scanned pages need external Chinese OCR. The reader does not reproduce the PDF’s page layout. Text tools → View / copy unchanged source keeps the original accessible after display-script conversion.

Press and hold a word, or keyboard-focus it and press Enter, to see definitions. Inspect individual characters, correct a particular occurrence’s pronunciation, or save words. Automatic readings can be wrong for names, ambiguous words and regional pronunciations. A displayed correction does not retrain the narration voice.

Save and back up

Save texts in Library. Use Text tools → Export library backup before clearing browser data or changing devices. Restore that file in another browser to transfer your library. Backups exclude attached audio; retain original audio and timing files separately. Read the storage and privacy details.

On iPad and iPhone the default character face is Iansui, a bundled handwritten learning font. Choose Aa · Fonts beside the article title to compare typefaces. Later font choices stay saved.

Keyboard shortcuts

Common questions

Is ToneWick free?

The reader, dictionary, starter stories and their recordings are free to use without an account. Natural narration for your own text is also free for everyone, with consent and shared usage limits. No account or access code is needed.

Does it support traditional Chinese and zhuyin?

Yes. You can display traditional or simplified characters and choose zhuyin. Zhuyin is derived from the same machine-assisted pinyin, so it is not an independent source of Taiwan pronunciations.

Why is a character not moving?

It may lack individual audio timing, motion may be off, playback may be paused, or your device may prefer reduced motion. Starter recordings include every Chinese character. Prepared narration uses acoustic alignment, with approximate recovery for short gaps. Device voices vary: without character timing, their words can highlight but individual motion is limited. Narration never waits for an animation.

Does it upload my books?

Ordinary reading does not upload your documents. Optional English translation sends a small batch of short passages after consent. Optional new voice generation sends only the reviewed page text after consent. A network device voice may use its own provider; ToneWick asks before using it.

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