Read real Chinese, with pinyin over every word
Written by Darren Nah, who builds Toku Reader. Checked October 2026.
Graded readers run out. The Chinese you actually want to read (the news, a novel, a website, the podcast you listen to on the way to work) has no pinyin and no glossary, and stopping to look up every third character kills the pleasure of reading it. Toku Reader puts pinyin over the characters of whatever you bring to it, and a tap on any word gives you its meaning without leaving the page.
What you can bring
- A web page. Open any Chinese site in the app's web reader, or share a page to it from Safari. The page keeps its layout, with pinyin over the characters.
- Pasted text, an article you copied, a message, a passage from a textbook.
- A book or a document. EPUB and PDF, or a photo of a printed page.
- A podcast or your own audio. If an episode has no transcript, the app writes one on your phone, and the transcript gets pinyin like everything else. See the podcast page.
The tone you say, not the tone in the dictionary
Pinyin from a dictionary gives every character its own tone. Spoken Chinese changes some of them: 不 and 一 change with the sound that follows, and two third tones in a row are not said as written. Toku works out the pinyin from the whole sentence and writes the tone you actually hear, so what you read matches what a speaker says. Tones are colour-coded, and you can turn the pinyin off when you want to test yourself.
Tap a word
Toku splits the sentence into words first, so a tap gives you the word (电脑, not 电 and then 脑). The card shows the pinyin, the meaning, the HSK level and a breakdown of each character. Save the word and it goes into your review list with the sentence you found it in.
Simplified and Traditional
Both are treated as first-class. A Traditional page stays Traditional, the dictionary is searched in both scripts, and you choose which one you'd rather see first.
Offline, and no account
Fetching a web page needs a connection; reading it afterwards does not. The dictionaries are inside the app, there's no account to make, and nothing you read is sent anywhere.