The best Traditional Chinese tools

Shows you where characters actually come from — ancient forms, sound components, meaning components — instead of inventing mnemonics, then feeds you sentences and short media graded to what you already know. The character-origin data is genuinely scholarly and the free tier is generous. The interface is dense and does not hold your hand, so it suits self-directed learners more than beginners who want a guided path.

Aimed squarely at the hardest transition in Chinese — from graded readers to native text — by making any Chinese webpage or imported file tappable for pinyin, definitions and text-to-speech, with difficulty estimates for novels. Reading itself is free; premium adds sync, offline and sentence translation. Best once you have roughly HSK 4 vocabulary; below that even with lookups the novels are a slog.

A free, open-source Chrome extension that turns the whole Chinese web into readable material: hover for pinyin, definition and word segmentation, with keyboard shortcuts to save words for export to Anki. It is the cheapest way to start reading native articles rather than textbook passages. Purely a lookup crutch — it will not make you learn anything unless you also review what you save.