Your everyday Cantonese toolkit

Chinese to Jyutping.

Find Cantonese pronunciation for Chinese characters, review alternative readings and copy Jyutping with tone numbers.

Read the word, keep the tone.

Find Cantonese readings

Enter Chinese characters to find dictionary Jyutping with tone numbers. Known words stay together; alternative readings remain available to review.

Chinese text

Up to 2,000 characters. Traditional and Simplified forms work where present in the dictionary. This finds readings; it does not translate Mandarin wording into spoken Cantonese.

Your text is processed in this browser. Dictionary files load as needed.

A useful first pass

How to use the readings

Look up a word in context

Paste the whole word rather than one isolated character. A known dictionary word can have a reading different from its individual characters. For example, a word containing 行 may use a different reading from another word containing the same character.

The longest known word is preferred. Remaining characters are looked up individually. This is dictionary matching, not sentence-level understanding; names, slang, ambiguous word boundaries and pronunciation variants may need your review.

Keep all six tone numbers

Jyutping keeps a tone number from 1 to 6 after every syllable: 你好 is nei5 hou2. Read the letters and number together. The tool preserves dictionary lexical readings; it does not predict every tone change or regional pronunciation in connected speech.

Unknown characters stay visible without invented readings. Punctuation, Latin text and line breaks are preserved. A dashed underline marks Chinese text for which no reading was found.

Common questions

Does this translate Chinese into Cantonese?

No. It adds Cantonese readings to the written characters you provide. It does not rewrite grammar, choose colloquial Cantonese vocabulary or translate the meaning of a passage.

Why can one word have more than one reading?

Readings can differ by meaning, pronunciation convention or lexical tone. The first result follows the dictionary ranking and is not a guarantee for your sentence. The alternative-reading controls let you choose another listed reading without changing the original text.

Why is a reading missing or marked incomplete?

Rare characters or new words may be absent. A network problem can also prevent an extended dictionary file from loading. In that case the page explicitly marks the result incomplete; press the main action again to retry. Available common readings remain usable.

Is my passage uploaded or saved?

The lookup, preview and exports run in your browser, and this tool does not save your passage in site storage. It requests static dictionary files selected by the characters in your text, so those file requests may reveal something about the lookup to the host. Downloads, the clipboard and your browser’s print system are under your control.

Keep going

Learn Cantonese

Cantonese reading sheetsCreate printable Chinese reading sheets with Jyutping, adjustable character sizes and practice lines. Jyutping sound chartExplore Jyutping initials and common finals with Cantonese word examples. Search the reference, open spelling notes and print a study sheet. Cantonese tonesLearn the six Jyutping tone numbers with simple pitch diagrams, understand short p, t and k endings, and check your reading with small exercises.