Search 3,800 everyday Chinese phrases and sentences — greetings, introductions, travel, shopping, celebrations and classic sentence patterns. Every phrase is broken down syllable by syllable with pinyin tone marks above the characters, and recorded by a native speaker so you can hear the whole sentence at natural speed.
Play the audio once and try to repeat the whole sentence. Then look at the syllable chips and repeat one syllable at a time — the pinyin tone marks tell you exactly which of the four tones to use. If tone marks are new to you, read The Tones of Chinese Pinyin first: it takes about ten minutes and makes every phrase on this page readable.
Our free 55-lesson beginner course builds exactly on these everyday sentences — each lesson adds the grammar and vocabulary behind the patterns you see here, with audio for every example.