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.