Learn Chinese, anywhere you browse

字 zì  ·  look closely, read clearly

Hover or select any Chinese character on a page and its tone-colored pinyin, meaning, stroke order, and examples appear instantly, right in the Chrome side panel.

Available in the Chrome Web Store View on GitHub Privacy policy

Free & open source · works in Chrome 116+

On any page

Hover or select to look up

Point at a character to read it, or select a whole word for its reading and a character-by-character breakdown. Works on simplified and traditional pages (中國 resolves to 中国).

An optional inline popup shows the meaning right where you're reading, no need to glance away.

朋友
péng you
1. friend   2. companion

Pinyin that teaches

Tone-colored pinyin

Every syllable is colored by its tone, so pronunciation is visible at a glance and the four tones (plus neutral) stick in memory as you read.

māmámǎmàma
1st high 2nd rising 3rd dipping 4th falling neutral

Whole words, broken down

Word reading + every character

Smart longest-match segmentation finds the real word under your cursor, even when it's split across inline markup, then shows what each character contributes.

喜欢
xǐ huān
HSK 1verb
  1. to like
  2. to be fond of
喜xǐto like, to be fond of
欢huānjoyful, merry

Learn to write

Animated stroke order

Watch any character drawn stroke by stroke, with its radical and components highlighted. Replay as many times as you like.

子radical · child

Study by level

HSK levels & one-tap highlighting

Every entry shows its HSK 3.0 level, bands 1–6 and the advanced 7–9. From the toolbar, highlight all HSK words up to a chosen level across the whole page, optionally colored band by band.

HSK 1 HSK 2 HSK 3 HSK 4 HSK 5 HSK 6 HSK 7-9

我喜欢在图书馆学习中文。

Distraction-free

Reader mode with pinyin ruby

Open any article in a clean reader with selectable fonts, larger text, and column width. Add tone-colored pinyin above every character, and the dictionary stays live as you read.

我的中文生活

我wǒ很hěn喜xǐ欢huān喝hē茶chá。

PDFs, too

Hover & select in PDFs, even scanned ones

Open a PDF and Zilense offers to reopen it in a built-in viewer where hover, lookup, and selection work just like on a web page. Scanned or image-only PDFs (photographed workbooks, textbooks) are recognized with offline OCR, a bundled Chinese model, no network, so even pictures of text become hoverable.

好hǎo吃chī 杯bēi子zi 衣yī服fú

📄 Scanned PDF · OCR

On video, too

Dual subtitles with pinyin Experimental

On YouTube, the on-video captions get the same tone-colored pinyin and clickable words. Hover or tap a word (try it →) and it opens in the side panel, just like on a page.

Turn on dual subtitles to read Chinese on top and a second language below. English by default, switchable in the toolbar menu. It's early and leans on each site's player, so expect rough edges. Netflix support is coming in a future release.

▶ YouTube
▶

我wǒ喜xǐ欢huān喝hē茶chá

I like drinking tea

See it in context

Real example sentences

Expand the Examples section on any entry to pull real-world sentences from the Tatoeba corpus, each with tone-colored pinyin and an English translation, fetched on demand.

Examples
我很喜欢喝茶。
Wǒ hěn xǐhuān hē chá.
I really like drinking tea.
他是一个学生。
Tā shì yí gè xuéshēng.
He is a student.

Find anything

Search by hanzi, pinyin, or English

Type characters, pinyin (tone marks optional, e.g. nihao), or an English word. Results are ranked so common and HSK words come first.

茶chá HSK 1tea
喝茶hēcháto drink tea
绿茶lǜchágreen tea

Names, places & brands

Proper nouns resolve, too

Beyond everyday words, Zilense merges in CedPane, about 74,000 public-domain names, places, and brands, so people, cities, companies, and countries resolve instead of coming up blank, each clearly marked as a proper noun.

北京
běi jīng
proper nounplace
  1. Beijing, capital of China
北běinorth
京jīngcapital city

Build your deck

Save words & revisit history

Star any entry to keep it in your deck, and every deliberate lookup is logged in history. It all stays on your device.

朋友péng you
friend
★
学习xué xí
to study, to learn
★
中文zhōng wén
Chinese language
★

Study & review

Flashcards for HSK & your saved words

Open a full-page trainer and drill your starred words or any HSK 3.0 level, built straight from the official lists, one card per entry with its exact gloss, part of speech, and pinyin.

Study just one level or everything up to it, choose a pool (unseen, recently or ever missed), flip with the keyboard, and export to Anki. Progress stays on your device.

HSK 1 ▾
chá
茶
tea noun
12 / 20

Dock it or float it

Side panel, or a window of its own

Keep the dictionary docked in Chrome's side panel, or pop it out into a detached window that floats free and stays put as you switch tabs.

Both share the same saved words, settings, and live hover & selection lookups. Open whichever fits how you read, or launch either with a keyboard shortcut.

Zilense
字
zì
HSK 1noun· very common
  1. character
  2. word
  3. letter

Make it yours

Themes, fonts & tone colors

Pick an accent color, choose a serif or sans Chinese face, toggle tone colors, set your pin key, and switch to dark mode. Try the controls →

Display
Accent
Chinese face
Pinyin tone colors
Familiarity tags
Dark mode
Pin key (hover + press)p

Spaced for memory

Track what you know Experimental

Turn on familiarity tracking and tag each word New, Learning, or Known right from its entry. Zilense also counts how many times you've seen it.

A Progress tab gathers every word you've met, filterable by how well you know it, and the same filter sorts your saved deck. It all stays on your device.

学习
seen 6×
xué xí
HSK 1verb
Progress · words you've met
学习xué xí
to study, to learn
中文zhōng wén
Chinese language

Private by design

Your saved words and settings stay on your device. No analytics, no tracking, nothing sent to the developer. Read the privacy policy →