Pinyin Converter: Chinese Characters to Pinyin (With Tones)
Free pinyin converter: paste Chinese text, get pinyin with tone marks and plain letters. Covers tone rules, polyphonic character limits, and passport name spelling.
Free pinyin converter: paste Chinese text, get pinyin with tone marks and plain letters. Covers tone rules, polyphonic character limits, and passport name spelling.
Convert Chinese characters to pinyin instantly — with and without tone marks. Covers 3,755 common characters, runs entirely in your browser.
Hanyu Pinyin is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. It maps Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet so that 北京 becomes Běijīng and 你好 becomes nǐ hǎo. China’s National People’s Congress approved the scheme in 1958, and it later became the international standard for romanizing Mandarin: the ISO adopted it as ISO 7098, and the United Nations followed in 1986. Even Taiwan, which long used other systems, made Hanyu Pinyin official for romanization in 2009 (source: Wikipedia).
One thing pinyin is not: a pronunciation-optional spelling aid. Mandarin is a tonal language, and the tone marks carry real meaning. mǎi (买, buy) and mài (卖, sell) are opposite actions separated by nothing but a tone.
Each mark sits over a vowel and tells you the pitch contour of the syllable. The classic demonstration uses the syllable ma, which means four different things depending on tone:
| Tone | Mark | Pitch | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | mā | High and level | 妈 (mother) |
| Second | má | Rising, like a question | 麻 (hemp) |
| Third | mǎ | Dips low, then rises | 马 (horse) |
| Fourth | mà | Sharp fall | 骂 (scold) |
| Neutral | ma | Light, no mark | 吗 (question particle) |
Some Chinese characters have more than one legitimate reading, and the correct one depends on context. These are called polyphonic characters (多音字). The character 行 reads xíng in 行走 (to walk) but háng in 银行 (bank). 长 is cháng (long) in 长城 but zhǎng (to grow, chief) in 长大. 重 flips between zhòng (heavy) and chóng (again).
What this means for the tool: this converter assigns each character its most common reading. For everyday text that gets the large majority of syllables right, but it can miss context-dependent readings, and it cannot know that a person surnamed 单 pronounces it Shàn rather than dān. Treat the output as a strong first draft, and double-check names and any syllable that looks off.
Three situations come up constantly. Learners use pinyin to attach pronunciation to characters they can read but not yet say aloud. Non-Chinese speakers use it to render Chinese names in English documents, emails, and citations; the Library of Congress converted its entire Chinese catalog to pinyin for exactly this reason. And anyone typing Chinese on a standard keyboard is already using pinyin, since it is the dominant input method for Mandarin.
Tip: if you are romanizing a name for a passport, visa form, or airline booking, drop the tone marks. Official documents use plain letters, so 李伟 is written Li Wei, not Lǐ Wěi. Keep the tone marks when the goal is pronunciation, not paperwork.
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