Teaching Chinese online: pinyin above the characters, a word in one tap

A Chinese teacher has a job nobody else has. The lesson text arrives as a wall of characters: Chinese is written without spaces, and a student who knows half the characters still cannot read a paragraph — they cannot see where one word ends and the next begins. Which also means they cannot look anything up: to find something, you first have to know what to look for.

The usual fix is to do it by hand. The teacher marks the text up in advance, writes in the pinyin, prepares a separate file with the readings — and does it all again for every new material. Here is what the platform takes off your hands instead.

The reading sits above the word, not under the text

Pinyin is printed right above the words, with tone marks. Not as a separate line under the paragraph, not as a footnote at the end — where the eye looks for it. One switch turns it on and off: in the early lessons the reading stays on, later it comes off, and the same text grows with the student.

The readings are not guessed character by character. The text is segmented into words first, and each word gets its own reading, so alternative pronunciations resolve from context — 长 in 长城 and in 长大 come out differently, because the analysis looks at the whole word. Neutral tone, where automatic generators go wrong most often, comes from a bundled lexicon: 谢谢 is written «xiè xie», not «xiè xiè».

Spaces the language does not have

The second switch pushes the words apart. Formally that is wrong — Chinese text has no spaces; practically it is exactly what a beginner is missing. Once the boundaries are visible, they read the paragraph as a sequence of words rather than a run of characters, and can ask about a specific word instead of «this bit here».

The good part is that this is a reader setting, not a property of the text. The student keeps the spaces on for as long as they need them, and on your screen the text stays exactly as you wrote it.

Simplified and traditional — one button

A text opens in the script its author typed: traditional material stays traditional and is never quietly rewritten. 妳, 臺 and 隻 do not collapse into 你, 台 and 只 — if the teacher wrote it that way, that is what the student sees.

Switching works in either direction at any moment — it is one setting with two positions, not two buttons. Handy when some of your materials came from Taiwan while the class is working through a mainland textbook.

A word in one tap

Tapping a word opens a card: the reading, the translation, the HSK level and the audio. From there the word goes into the student’s own vocabulary — and from then on a spaced-repetition trainer brings it back, rather than a list nobody opens.

The HSK level next to the word is not decoration: it shows at a glance what is beyond this student in the text and what they were supposed to know two levels ago. Around five thousand words in the bundled lexicon carry a level.

• The reading with tones and the translation are on the card itself — no other tab needed
• HSK 2.0 level, where the word is part of the syllabus
• Spoken in a Chinese voice, even when the class has no language set
• An «add to my words» button: the word lands in the student’s trainer

Nothing to mark up

The reading layer turns itself on from the text, not from the language of the class. That matters more than it sounds: classes often have no language set at all, and material carried over from an old platform brings characters in anywhere. The platform looks at the characters, and if it is Chinese, it offers the reading.

Nothing is stored and nothing is «rebuilt»: the analysis is derived from the text as it is shown. Fix a word in an exercise and the reading above it changes with it — there is no second copy to keep in agreement with the first.

One small thing everyone who has typed Chinese on the web notices: the pinyin is not part of the page text. A paragraph copies out clean — characters only, with no readings mixed in.

The settings belong to whoever is reading

Pinyin, spaces and script are settings of the reader’s browser, not properties of the lesson. A teacher who switches to traditional to check something does not rewrite the text in front of the student. And the other way round: a student can keep the reading on for the whole lesson without asking you for anything.

On a phone the layer is built for a finger rather than a cursor: words are tapped, and lines carry extra leading so the reading never lands on the line above.

Worth knowing up front

Three things it is fairer to say now than to let you hit mid-lesson.

• The reading works in the lesson’s text exercises. In the other exercise types Chinese is still plain text for now — we are widening that.
• The analysis is built for a lesson text, not a book: a very long text is not segmented at all and simply renders as usual — without pinyin and without word boundaries.
• Answer checking forgives diacritics by default, and pinyin tone marks are diacritics: «ma» is accepted for «mā». Strict matching is a per-class switch, but it is strict about everything at once, not only tones.