Reading Chinese on the site

Q: Why did tapping one character give me a two-character word?

Because that is the word. The popup reads the characters around the one you touched and resolves the longest match, then highlights the whole thing — 好 on its own means something different from 你好.

Q: Can I turn the popup off?

There is no switch for it. It only opens on hover or tap, so it stays out of the way until you ask for it; if it is firing while you read, moving the pointer off the text closes it.

Q: Why does the popup not open inside an exercise?

It is disabled anywhere you are being tested. Tapping for the answer mid-question would defeat the exercise, so the popup waits until you are reading rather than answering.

Q: Some words have no audio. Why?

Recording coverage is not complete across every entry. Where a recording exists you get a listen button; where it does not, the card simply omits it rather than playing something synthetic.

Q: Do I need an account for any of this?

Only for the flashcard button, which has to have somewhere to save the word. Looking up, listening and reading the full entry all work signed out.

You do not need to know a character to read a page here. Every Chinese character on the site is tappable, and what comes back is a pronunciation, a meaning, an HSK band and — usually — a recording of a native speaker saying it. This is the single feature most worth knowing on day one.

Tap any character

Hover a character on a desktop, or tap it on a phone. A small card appears with:

The strokes, animated — Every character in the word is drawn stroke by stroke, in order, as the card opens — the radical picked out in red.
The pinyin — Tone-marked, and colour-coded by tone so the shape of the word is visible before you read it.
A listen button — Where the entry has audio — a native recording, not a synthesised approximation.
The first meaning — The primary gloss. For the full set of senses, the card links to the dictionary entry.
The HSK band — Which level this word belongs to, so you can tell instantly whether it is something you are supposed to know yet.
The radical and stroke count — Two more chips beside the band: the radical the character is filed under, and how many strokes it takes to write.
Add to flashcards — One tap puts the word into your review deck. If it is already in there, the button says so rather than adding it twice.

Where it works

Nearly everywhere there is Chinese text: lesson dialogue, reading passages, listening transcripts, example sentences, grammar patterns, culture articles and the day’s Dragon Daily.

It does not run inside interactive exercises, and that is deliberate — being able to tap for the answer while you are being tested on it would make the test pointless.

When the card is not enough

The popup is a glance. For everything else the dictionary entry has the whole picture: every sense rather than the first, the traditional form, the character’s etymology and its full component breakdown, example sentences at your level, related words, and where the word sits in the HSK ladder.

All of it is free and needs no account.

The dictionary page’s “What Every Entry Includes” section: an introductory paragraph, then six labelled features in two columns, each with a red icon and a short explanation — Search HSK, Etymology and Sentence Examples on the left, Stroke Order, Pronunciation and Radical Decomposition on the right. — Etymology is the one of these six the popup card cannot give you at all. The card already animates the strokes, names the radical and plays the audio — the full entry is where the character’s history and its complete component breakdown live.

Hearing it

Audio on entries, lessons and passages is recorded once and served to everyone, so playing it costs you nothing and you can replay it as often as you like. If a listen button does nothing, that is almost always the browser’s autoplay policy rather than a missing file — one tap anywhere on the page first usually settles it.

Common questions

1Does looking a word up cost credits?

No. The popup and the dictionary read stored data; no AI is involved, so nothing is charged.

2Why did tapping one character give me a two-character word?

3Can I turn the popup off?

4Why does the popup not open inside an exercise?

5Some words have no audio. Why?

6Do I need an account for any of this?

Continue learning

Using the dictionarySearch 21,000 entries by character, pinyin or meaning, and read everything a single entry holds.Audio will not playThe usual causes in order of likelihood, and what to try before writing to us.Profile and preferencesYour name, email, avatar, helper language and the settings that change how the site behaves.