Chinese Text to Speech
Turn a simplified Chinese text to audio (speech) to listen to the pronunciation character by character.
Hearing a character is not the same as reading its pinyin
Pinyin tells you what a syllable should sound like, but only if you already know what the letters stand for, and several of them do not stand for what an English speaker expects. The letters q, x, c and zh are the usual casualties, and a learner who has only ever read them tends to have pronounced them wrongly for months without knowing it.
Hearing the syllable settles it in a second. This tool reads a Chinese text aloud character by character, which is the form that is most useful for study: you hear each syllable separately, with its tone, rather than a fluent stream in which the tones blur into each other.
It pairs naturally with the pinyin exercises, where you hear a syllable and write it down. Recognising a tone by ear is a skill of its own, quite separate from producing it, and it is the one that decides whether you will understand anything when you get there.