General Procedure

  1. Paste (or manually enter) Chinese character text into the form at the home page.
  2. Click the transcribe button.
  3. Enjoy the pinyin transcription.

The Tones

The tones for each word are represented with these four images.

   Tone one : TONE ONE (steady high pitch)
   Tone two : TONE TWO (mid rising to high picth)
Tone three : TONE THREE (mid falling to low, then rising to high pitch)
   Tone four: TONE FOUR (high falling to low pitch)

For a detailed explanation, see the Wikipedia article on the four tones of Mandarin.

Pinyin

The pinyin is a standard phonetic representation of Chinese.
For a detailed explanation, see the Wikipedia article on pinyin.