HanziCamera

Point it at a page of Chinese and every character gets its pinyin. Tap a word to see what it means. No ads, no accounts, no internet — it all happens on your device.

Hanzi Camera reads printed Chinese and puts the pinyin above it.

Photograph a page — a worksheet, a textbook, a storybook, a sign. Highlight the line you want with your finger, the way you would with a real highlighter. The line comes back with pinyin above every character, big enough to read aloud.

Tap any word to see what it means.

HELP YOU TO LEARN CHINESE Most camera apps translate Chinese into English. That replaces the language people are trying to learn. Hanzi Camera does the opposite: the characters stay exactly where they are, and the pinyin sits above them as a scaffold.

IT WOULD RATHER SAY NOTHING THAN GUESS

A confidently wrong tone is worse than no help at all. When a character has more than one possible reading, Hanzi Camera shows every reading rather than picking one and hoping. When it cannot read something — handwriting, a bad photo, a word it does not know — it says so instead of inventing an answer.

Readings come per word, not per character, so 长高 is zhǎng gāo while 变长 is biàn cháng.

BUILT TO BE SIMPLE

• Two buttons: take a photo, or choose one • Pinch to zoom in on small print • Undo and redo step through your lookups, so one photo serves many questions • Works on an old iPhone or a hand-me-down iPad — iOS 16 and up

FREE, WITH NO CATCH

Every part of the app is free. Nothing is locked, there is no trial and there are no ads. The in-app purchases you can see listed are an optional tip jar for the developer — they unlock nothing, and the app is identical whether you use them or not.

PRIVACY

The app makes no network calls at all. There are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no data collection of any kind. Photos are saved to your camera roll, so your usual iCloud Photos settings apply to them.

Simplified Chinese only. Dictionary data from CC-CEDICT, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.