Read Mandarin
Free graded Chinese reading practice for HSK 1–6, with pinyin, audio, tap-to-translate
and comprehension quizzes.
→ readmandarin.com
Every text is original. No textbook passages, no scraped content — each reading is
written to stay inside the vocabulary of its HSK level, so you can read without
hitting a wall every second sentence.
What's in it
| |
|---|
| 315 readings | HSK 1–6, roughly 50 per level |
| 5,024 words | every word that appears in a reading, indexed by level |
| 659 grammar patterns | pulled from the readings, indexed by level |
| 1,834 characters | with stroke-order animations |
Features
- Pinyin over every character, toggleable — lean on it early, switch it off later
- Tap any word for its meaning, plus real example sentences from other readings
- Audio on every sentence and every word, with a 0.7× slow mode for shadowing
- Stroke-order animations for any character in the text
- Three-question comprehension check at the end of each reading
- Grammar notes explaining the patterns that reading introduces
- Wordbook + flashcards — star a word, review it later
- Reading streak and progress tracking
- Dark mode, offline support (PWA), works on phones
Levels
HSK 1 ·
HSK 2 ·
HSK 3 ·
HSK 4 ·
HSK 5 ·
HSK 6
How it's built
A dependency-free static site generator in plain Python — no framework, no npm, no
build pipeline beyond one script.
content/texts/*.json one reading per file
build.py generates docs/ from content/
gen_audio.py pre-renders sentence + word audio (edge-tts)
get_strokes.py fetches stroke data for characters actually used
validate_texts.py schema check: sentence counts, pinyin tones, quiz answers
Build it:
python3 build.py # content/ -> docs/
That's the whole toolchain. docs/ is served as a static site on Cloudflare Pages.
Reading format
Each reading is a single JSON file. Tokens carry their own pinyin and gloss, which is
what makes per-word audio and tap-to-translate possible without a runtime dictionary:
{
"slug": "hsk1-my-day",
"level": 1,
"title_zh": "我的一天",
"title_py": "Wǒ de yì tiān",
"title_en": "My Day",
"sentences": [
{ "t": [["我","wǒ","I"],["七点","qī diǎn","seven o'clock"],
["起床","qǐchuáng","to get up"],["。"]],
"en": "I get up at seven o'clock." }
],
"vocab": [["起床","qǐchuáng","to get up"]],
"quiz": [{"q":"What time does the narrator get up?","a":["Six","Seven","Eight"],"c":1}],
"grammar":[{"p":"time before verb","e":"Chinese puts the time word before the verb.",
"x":"我七点起床。 — I get up at seven."}]
}
Who makes it
Written and maintained by Fei, a Mandarin teacher. The site is free and stays free —
if reading is the part you can do alone, speaking is the part that needs a person, and
that's what the lessons are for.
License
Code is MIT. The readings themselves are original work — please don't republish them
as your own, but linking to them is always welcome.
