Chinese Sentence Breakdown
Paste a Chinese sentence to explore its words, pinyin, meanings, and HSK levels.
The rules applied
- 分词连写 (words joined, spaced apart) — syllables of one word are written together (学习 → xuéxí); words are separated by spaces.
- 隔音符号 (apostrophe) — a syllable beginning with a/o/e takes an apostrophe after the previous syllable (西安 → Xī'ān, 皮袄 → pí'ǎo).
- 儿化 (-r) — the 儿 suffix is written as -r attached to the syllable it colors (一会儿 → yīhuìr), not as a syllable of its own.
- 大写 (capitals) — every sentence opens with a capital letter; tone-marked vowels capitalize too (ǎi → Ǎi).
- 结构助词 的/地/得 (separate) — 的, 地 and 得 are written apart from the words around them and read neutral (的时候 → de shíhou, 慢慢地走 → mànmàn de zǒu, 跑得快 → pǎo de kuài). Fused dictionary words keep their entry (目的 → mùdì).
- 动词+宾语 (verb | object apart) — a verb and its object are written as two words when the object stands alone (踢足球 → tī zúqiú, 打电话 → dǎ diànhuà, 写作业 → xiě zuòyè); lexicalized nouns and directional complements stay whole (出租车 → chūzūchē, 看起来 → kànqǐlai).
- 能愿动词 (modal verbs apart) — modal verbs like 要, 能, 会, 想 are words of their own, never fused into the word that follows (要好好准备 → yào hǎohǎo zhǔnbèi, 想要去 → xiǎng yào qù). Words where the character is only a morpheme stay whole (想念 → xiǎngniàn).
- 重叠式 (reduplication joined) — an adjective/verb reduplication is one word (好好 → hǎohǎo, 试试 → shìshì), written together even when used as an adverbial (好好准备 → hǎohǎo zhǔnbèi).
- 动态助词 着/了/过 (joined, neutral) — straight after a verb they attach to it without a tone mark (踢了 → tīle, 看着 → kànzhe, 去过 → qùguo); a sentence-final 了 is a modal particle and stays apart (已经踢了十年了 → yǐjīng tīle shí nián le). 们 joins the noun it pluralizes (学生们 → xuéshēngmen).
- 原调 (original tones) — tones are marked in citation form per GB/T 16159: 一 and 不 keep yī / bù, and the neutral tone stays unmarked (学习 → xuéxí).
Frequently asked questions
Which pinyin standard does this follow?
GB/T 16159-2012, the national standard for Hanyu Pinyin orthography: the words of a sentence are written together syllable by syllable and separated by spaces (fēncí liánxiě), an apostrophe marks a syllable beginning with a/o/e (Xī'ān), the 儿 suffix is written -r (yīhuìr), every sentence opens with a capital letter, and tones are written in their original form — 一 stays yī and 不 stays bù even where speech changes them, and the neutral tone carries no mark.
Where do the readings come from?
From a CC-CEDICT-derived word dictionary. Words are looked up whole first, so polyphonic characters and neutral tones follow the word — 银行 reads yínháng, not yínxíng. A character that starts no dictionary word falls back to its per-character reading, and the GB/T 16159 particle rules are applied on top: 的/地/得 read neutral and are written apart (的时候 → de shíhou), a verb takes 了/着/过 joined with their neutral readings (踢了 → tīle), and a sentence-final 了 reads le and stands alone.
Why does my sentence sometimes split oddly?
Segmentation matches the longest dictionary word at each position, without a statistical model — ambiguous strings such as 研究生命起源 can come out as 研究生 | 命 instead of 研究 | 生命. Word boundaries in Chinese are genuinely underspecified; where a split looks wrong, the per-word pinyin is still correct for the words it did find.
Can I practice or print the words in my sentence?
Yes. Every annotated sentence offers two exits: send the word list to the writing worksheet generator as a printable practice sheet, or turn it into a printable flashcard deck.