中文
Lingo7 lets you read books with a translation under every sentence in 49 languages. Chinese is not one of them yet. Ask for it below, and see what adding it takes and what reading Chinese involves.
Lingo7 does not read Chinese yet: the app has no Chinese dictionary, audio or books, and Chinese text needs splitting into words, since it has no spaces. Readers ask for Japanese, Korean and Chinese most often. Leave your email to vote; we add the most requested languages first and write to you once, when Chinese is ready.
We add the most requested languages first. Leave your email and we'll write to you once, when Chinese is ready.
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The demo below is the live reader with a German book. Chinese would work the same way once it is added.
Spoken in: China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Taiwan, Singapore; large communities across Southeast Asia
A Chinese character stands for one syllable and, almost always, one unit of meaning. Most characters are built from parts: of the 3,500 characters in everyday use, about 58% pair a component that hints at the meaning with one that hints at the sound, so 妈 (mother) combines 女 (woman) with 马 (ma). The hints are rough, but they make characters much easier to remember than they first look. There are no spaces, so a reader also has to see where each word ends.
Learner texts print help on the page. In mainland China and in most courses abroad it is pinyin, the Latin spelling with tone marks; in Taiwan, primary school books print zhuyin (bopomofo), a set of 37 phonetic symbols, beside the characters. Graded readers such as Mandarin Companion (150 to 450 core characters, by level) and Chinese Breeze fill the gap between textbooks and real books. Many learner books state their level in HSK, the official proficiency test, which has nine levels in its 2021 standard.
Mainland books and newspapers run horizontally, left to right: the People's Daily switched from vertical columns on 1 January 1956 and the other papers followed. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, vertical text read top to bottom and right to left is still common in novels, newspapers and magazines. Wherever you read, you will meet chengyu, four-character idioms that come from classical Chinese and are still common in modern writing.
There is no date yet. We add the most requested languages first, and Chinese needs the work described on this page. Leave your email in the form and we will write to you once, when Chinese is ready.
Not yet. Lingo7 has no Chinese dictionary, audio or shelf of books, so a Chinese book would not get the sentence-by-sentence translation and word lookups the app is built on. The 49 languages it does read are listed on the home page.
One vote per email address per language. The count on this page shows a number once at least 10 people have asked, and refreshes within a minute of a new vote. Your email is stored only to tell you when Chinese launches, and deleted whenever you ask at support@lingoseven.com.
With it at the start, then without. Pinyin tells you how a character sounds, not what it means, and books and websites for adults never print it, so a reader who relies on it too long struggles with real texts. Reading a passage twice, first with pinyin and then without, is a simple way to make the switch.
A little. Taiwan uses traditional characters, and some words are pronounced differently: 垃圾 (garbage) is lājī on the mainland and lèsè in Taiwan. Vocabulary differs too, especially for newer things: software is 软件 on the mainland and 軟體 in Taiwan.
No. Modern books are written in the vernacular written language. Classical Chinese shows up mainly in four-character idioms and quotations, which learners pick up one at a time as they read.