Online Chinese Keyboard
Type pinyin and get Chinese characters, with nothing to install and no signup. It converts characters back into pinyin as well. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you type leaves this page. We count how often the tool is used, never what you write with it.
How to type Chinese characters
Chinese is not typed character by character. You type the sound of a word in pinyin and pick the character you meant, which is exactly how every Chinese keyboard works, on every phone and computer in China. Type ni hao and you get 你好. Type a whole sentence and you get a whole sentence.
The hard part is that Mandarin has only about 400 syllables for several thousand characters, so one sound belongs to many characters. Typing shi could mean 是, 十, 时, 事 and a dozen more. Every converter has to choose, and choosing well is the difference between a useful tool and a guessing game.
Why this one picks better characters
Candidates are ranked by HSK level first and frequency second, so the character a learner actually wants comes up first. Typing shi offers 是 before 事, and xiang offers 想 before 相. A converter ranked on raw text frequency gets that second one backwards, because 相 is common inside words like 相信 while almost nobody types it on its own.
Whole words are matched before single characters, so xuexi becomes 学习 rather than 学 and 习 side by side. Adding tone numbers narrows things further: mai3 gives 买 and mai4 gives 卖.
Common words, typed in pinyin
A few conversions to try. Type any of these into the box above, or use them as a reference.
| Type this | You get |
|---|---|
| ni hao | 你好 |
| xiexie | 谢谢 |
| xiexie ni | 谢谢你 |
| zaijian | 再见 |
| duibuqi | 对不起 |
| qing wen | 请问 |
| wo ai ni | 我爱你 |
| wo shi xuesheng | 我是学生 |
| zhe shi shenme | 这是什么 |
| wo hen gaoxing | 我很高兴 |
| wo xiang xuexi zhongwen | 我想学习中文 |
| zhongguo | 中国 |
| meiguo | 美国 |
| hanyu | 汉语 |
| xuesheng | 学生 |
| laoshi | 老师 |
| pengyou | 朋友 |
| jintian | 今天 |
| mingtian | 明天 |
| yinhang | 银行 |
| chifan | 吃饭 |
| gongzuo | 工作 |
| shengri kuaile | 生日快乐 |
Reading Chinese back as pinyin
Switch the direction and paste Chinese text to see how it is pronounced, with tone marks or tone numbers. Readings are looked up a word at a time rather than a character at a time, which matters more than it sounds: 行 on its own is xíng, but 银行 is yínháng, and a tool that glues single characters together gets that wrong. The same goes for 长大 (zhǎngdà, not chángdà) and 音乐 (yīnyuè, not yīnlè).
Where a character genuinely has more than one reading and there is no word to settle it, the reading is underlined and you can click it to see the alternatives. If you want to move between tone numbers and tone marks on their own, the pinyin tone converter does just that, and the interactive pinyin chart shows every syllable with audio.
What this tool does not do
It writes citation tones and does not apply tone sandhi. In real speech 不 before a fourth tone becomes bú, and a third tone before another third tone becomes second, so 你好 is said níhǎo even though it is written nǐ hǎo. Dictionaries and HSK materials print the citation tones, and applying some of the sandhi rules but not others would be worse than applying none, so the output matches what your textbook shows.
It writes simplified characters only. It also has no idea what you mean: with no context, a converter cannot know whether nan is 南 or 难. That is what the alternatives are for. If you want to know how hard a piece of Chinese text is before you read it, the text difficulty checker measures it against the HSK 3.0 character lists.
Questions
How do I type Chinese without installing anything?
Type the pinyin for what you want to say and this page converts it to characters as you go. Type ni hao and you get 你好. Nothing is installed, nothing is signed up for, and it works the same on a phone, a school computer or a locked-down work laptop where you cannot add a keyboard.
What if it picks the wrong character?
Many syllables are shared by dozens of characters, so any converter has to guess. This one ranks candidates by HSK level, so the character a learner is most likely to want comes first. Where more than one is possible the character is underlined, and clicking it shows the alternatives with their meanings. Your pick is remembered for the rest of your visit.
Can I type tones?
Yes, and it makes the guessing much better. Add a tone number after a syllable, like ni3 hao3 or mai3 for 买 and mai4 for 卖, and only characters with that tone are offered. Tone marks typed or pasted directly, like nǐ hǎo, are understood too.
Does it convert Chinese back into pinyin?
Yes. Switch the direction and paste any Chinese text to read it in pinyin, with tone marks or tone numbers. Readings are looked up whole-word rather than character by character, which is what gets 银行 right as yínháng instead of yínxíng.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The dictionary is downloaded to your browser and every conversion happens on your own device. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored or logged. We count how often the tool gets used and how often our first character suggestion turns out to be the wrong one, so we can keep improving it, but never what you typed.
Does it write traditional characters?
No, it writes simplified characters, which is the standard in mainland China and what HSK tests. Traditional characters pasted into the pinyin direction may not be recognised.