Hanzi Helper

Hanzi Helper lets you add pinyin transcription to just the difficult words in any Chinese text, so that you can focus on fluency and comprehension without the distraction or temptation of pinyin above every word.

The user experience is simple and built for speed: Add a text, and start reading. Touch a word to toggle pinyin. Words with pinyin are added to a word list that can be studied, tested or exported.

Save as many texts as you like: Sort, search, tag, star and filter texts so you can easily find and study them.

There are many ways to add a text to Hanzi Helper:

• Copy Chinese text from any app and paste it into Hanzi Helper
• Paste a URL — Hanzi Helper will extract the text content
• Scan an image or photo to add text via optical character recognition (OCR)
• Use Hanzi Helper's share sheet from your browser or another app

Voice features:

• Listen to a voice read the text aloud, with karaoke-style highlighting of phrases
• Toggle between speaking modes: continuous mode or single step mode

Word study features:

• Detailed dictionary definitions, with pronunciation, context sentences, and component character definitions
• Test your recognition of difficult words by cycling through a text's selected words until all words are mastered
• Word difficulty tags show the newest HSK 3.0 bands (1-6 and 7+)
• See HSK word distributions for a text; bulk-add pinyin for any level
• Toggle pinyin and tone mark visibility independently to test your learning
• Choose your pinyin and tone mark colors: Switch between monochrome, character tones or HSK word level
• Auto-add pinyin to new texts for words from a specific HSK level and up

Additional features:

• Per-paragraph translation into English
• Switch between Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters
• Switch between Apple's Chinese system font (PingFang) or Apple's downloadable Songti (serif) and Kaiti (standard script) fonts
• Export and import texts for backup, to sync with other devices, or to share texts with others