Chinese to Pinyin Converter

A quick guide to pinyin output

New to pinyin, or wondering which output style to pick? Two minutes of background will make the converter’s options make sense.

What is pinyin?

Pinyin (拼音, “spell-sound”) is the standard romanization of Mandarin Chinese. It spells each syllable with Latin letters — nǐ, hǎo, shì, jiè — so learners can read and type Chinese before they can recognize every character. It is used in mainland Chinese schools, in almost every textbook and dictionary published for learners, and as the input method most people use to type Chinese on a phone. Pinyin is a pronunciation aid, not a translation: nǐ hǎo tells you how 你好 sounds, while the characters carry the meaning.

The four tones — and the neutral one

Mandarin is a tonal language: the pitch contour of a syllable changes its meaning. Pinyin marks this with a diacritic on the main vowel. The classic example uses the syllable mā (妈, mother, high level), má (麻, hemp, rising), mǎ (马, horse, dip-rise), and mà (骂, scold, falling). Some syllables also carry a light, unstressed neutral tone with no mark at all, like the second syllable of māma. If you ignore tones, mǎ and mà collapse into the same sound — which is why tone marks are worth keeping in your practice text.

Tone marks, tone numbers, or no tones?

Tone marks (nǐ hǎo) are the best default for reading: your eyes get the tone in the same glance as the letters. Tone numbers (ni3 hao3) are easier to type on any keyboard and are the format many dictionaries, textbook vocab lists, and flashcard apps expect; the number 0 marks a neutral tone, as in ma1 ma0. No-tone output strips the marks entirely — handy for signage, usernames, or when you only need the approximate sound. You can switch styles any time and re-convert with one click.

Ruby annotations: pinyin above the characters

Turn on Show Chinese + pinyin and each character keeps its own small pinyin printed just above it, in the traditional ruby layout used in Chinese graded readers and children’s books. This is the format most teachers recommend for reading practice, because your eye stays on the characters and only hops up to the pinyin when a character is new. Because the annotation is generated per character, it also shows exactly which reading was chosen for each one.

Polyphonic characters (多音字)

Many characters have several readings, and the right one depends on the word. 行 reads xíng in 行人 (pedestrian) but háng in 银行 (bank); 乐 reads lè in 快乐 (happy) but yuè in 音乐 (music). This converter reads your text word by word, not character by character, so most polyphones resolve automatically. When a name or a rare word leaves you unsure, search the character in the dictionary and compare all of its readings side by side.

What this converter deliberately does not change

Spoken Mandarin shifts tones in predictable patterns — 一 and 不 change tone before certain syllables, and two third tones in a row adjust. Textbooks disagree on whether to write those changes down, so this converter always prints dictionary tones: 不 stays bù and 一 stays yī, whatever follows them. That keeps output consistent with dictionaries and flashcards. The letter ü is kept as ü rather than converted to v or u, and any character the dictionary does not recognize is passed through unchanged rather than guessed at.

Tone changes you will hear in real speech

Even though the printed pinyin stays with dictionary tones, spoken Mandarin applies a few automatic adjustments every native speaker makes. When two third tones meet, the first usually rises to a second tone, so 很好 (hěn hǎo) is spoken closer to hén hǎo. The word 不 shifts to bú before a fourth tone, as in 不是 (bú shì), and 一 takes the tone of the opposite direction before numbers and measure words, as in 一个 (yí ge). You will also hear syllables lose their tone entirely in common combinations, like the second syllable of 妈妈. Knowing the written form and the spoken habit is genuinely useful: read the dictionary tone, then say the sandhi version the way a native speaker would.

ü, v, and u: a note on typing

The sound ü has no letter of its own on an English keyboard. Strictly, it only needs its two dots after l and n — lǚ (旅, travel) versus lu would be different syllables — because after j, q, x, and y the plain u is always pronounced ü anyway, as in 去 (qù). When typing, most people enter v in place of ü, so a pinyin input method expects lv3 for lǚ. This converter keeps ü exactly as pinyin writes it, so your annotations always match textbook conventions.