A free, open-source desktop app
Turn any Chinese e-book into a read-aloud, speak-back Mandarin tutor — pinyin over every character, and instant feedback on how you said it.
You give it a Chinese EPUB; it becomes a patient tutor. The app shows one short sentence at a time — big, centred, with the pinyin printed above every character — reads it aloud in a natural Mandarin voice, and then listens to you say it back. It marks each character green, red, or amber depending on how close you got, and moves on when you nail it. Everything runs on your own machine, for free, and your voice never leaves your computer.
Tone-marked pinyin sits above each character, so you always know how it's pronounced — no lookups.
Microsoft's neural Mandarin voices read each sentence — male or female, Mainland or Taiwan, five speeds.
Record yourself and a private, offline speech model checks your pronunciation. No internet, no account.
Every character turns green, red, or amber. Score 90% and the app advances to the next line on its own.
Read a Simplified book as Traditional or vice versa with one toggle — grading understands both.
Reopens your last book, chapter, and sentence, and remembers your voice, speed, and theme.
Built by a Cantonese speaker learning Mandarin — one that reads Traditional comfortably and wanted to get faster at Simplified. The whole loop is read, listen, speak, and get corrected, one sentence at a time.
The app is open source. Grab the code, install a few free Python packages, and run it — full step-by-step instructions are in the README.