The hardest stage of learning Chinese is the gap between "I know these characters" and "I can read this passage." A reading sheet with pinyin above every character bridges exactly that gap — and the same sheet can flip into a dictation test by hiding the characters instead.
What ruby annotations are for
Pinyin printed above characters is called ruby text, and its purpose is scaffolding: the eye learns the passage in one pass without stopping to look words up, and pronunciation attaches to the character shapes rather than to a separate lookup page. Children's books in China use it heavily; adult graded readers use it less and less as vocabulary grows. For practice material of your own — a poem, a textbook paragraph, a set of sentences for next week's lesson — you can now produce the same format from any passage in seconds.
Making a reading sheet
Paste the passage into the Pinyin Annotator and choose a tone style: tone marks (nǐ hǎo), tone numbers (ni3 hao3), or no tones at all for pure pronunciation drilling. The output is a print-ready sheet laid out for A4 — the same conversion runs in your browser, so the passage is never uploaded anywhere.
Three uses that come up constantly: a parent preparing the week's 课文 for a child who reads faster than they recognize; a teacher building a vocabulary-in-context handout; and a self-learner turning song lyrics or news paragraphs into material they can actually read.
Dictation practice: hide the characters
The trick that turns a reading aid into a test: hide the characters and keep the pinyin. What is left is a 看拼音写词语 sheet — pinyin-only lines where the learner writes the characters from pronunciation. It is one of the highest-yield exercises in Chinese schooling because it forces the audio-to-character mapping in the opposite direction from reading: you cannot lean on shape recognition at all.
Round out the same lesson with a writing sheet from the Tianzige generator: take the characters that came out wrong on the dictation sheet and generate one row of tracing plus rows of blank boxes for each. The two tools are designed to sit next to each other — annotate the text, dictate it, then drill what failed.
A note on tone marks
If the learner is past the beginner stage, use tone numbers instead of tone marks. Marks are kinder to read but easier to gloss over; numbers force attention to the tone on every syllable, which is where most persistent errors actually live. And when a sheet stops needing pinyin entirely, that is the signal to retire the scaffold for that passage and reread it clean.