Nothing changes until you open the link we send to the new
address.
Appearance
Mode
Accent colour
Delete account
Erases your account, library, folders, notes, pictures and
history for good. It cannot be undone.
About
About
Read Chinese you cannot type. Scan it, draw it, speak it or
paste it, and get the characters, Mandarin (Pinyin),
Cantonese (Yale) and English — with audio for both.
Type English to get Chinese back.
Then ask why. Our advanced Chinese AI answers questions
about the language itself — what a character is
built from, when to use one word over another, why a
sentence is phrased the way it is. It answers about
Chinese and nothing else, which is what makes it good
at it.
Ask our advanced Chinese AI anything about the language
Instant camera scanning
Drag & drop image upload
Handwriting recognition, for characters you can only draw
Speak Chinese or English and have it written down
Mandarin & Cantonese audio
Two-way translation, English ↔ Chinese
A reference page for every character and common word
Your archive: every card you save, kept and searchable
Share a card or an answer with a link
One-tap copy to clipboard
Quick start
Type into the text box, or fill it by scanning an image, drawing characters or speaking.
When drawing, tap a suggested character to add it to the box. Tap Clear canvas when you are ready for the next one.
Tap Translate & Pronounce. Chinese gives you English; English gives you Chinese, with Pinyin and Yale either way, and a speaker on each to hear it.
Copy any result, tap play to hear it, or open the full page for any character.
Whatever is in the text box is loaded into the ask box underneath as you go, so asking our advanced Chinese AI about it is a press — before you translate it, instead of translating it, or after. Change the question to whatever you want to know: a character, a grammar point, the difference between two words. Press one of the examples to see what it does.
Install
scanchinese.com
Powered by frontier AI
Scan Chinese.Read it, hear it, learn it.
The most advanced AI-powered Chinese scanner,
translator and dictionary.
Point your camera at a sign, draw a character you have seen,
or paste Chinese characters. Get Pinyin, Cantonese Yale,
English and audio back, and a reference page for anything you
want to understand properly. With an account, everything you
look up is saved to your own library, ready to review and
practise later.
Drop an image with Chinese textor tap to browse your files
or
Drag on the picture to read just one part of it.
Tap a character to add it
Draw a character to see suggestions
Suggestions appear as you draw; tap one to add it to the text box.
Recognize+ asks the cloud recognizer when they are wrong.
Text to translateChinese or English
Try it without an account — scan, draw, type or ask the Chinese AI. An account adds dictation, character pages written for you, and keeps every card you make.
Characters, tones, grammar, the difference between two words
that look the same. Ask the way you would ask a teacher — it
runs on frontier AI, knows Chinese in depth and answers about
nothing else.
Nothing saved yet. Translate something and tap Save to start your library.
Sign in
Character
叶
Simplified叶
Traditional葉
Strokes5
Radical口
HSK4
FrequencyCommon — the 葉/叶 word family is within roughly the 1,000 most frequent characters, and it is frequent again as a surname.
叶 is the everyday word for a leaf — of a tree, a plant, or tea. In traditional characters it is written 葉 (grass radical over 枼), and it is also a very common Chinese surname, romanised Yip or Ip in Cantonese (as in Ip Man, 葉問). Confusingly, the shape 叶 was already an old character in its own right, read xié, meaning 'to be in harmony', which survives in a few technical words about rhyme.
Mandarinyè · ㄧㄝˋ
Cantonesejip6 · yihp
The separate reading xié (Cantonese hip3, Yale hip) is rare and belongs to the older character 叶 'harmonise', not to 葉.
nouna thin leaf-like sheet or blade (e.g. 叶片 a blade of a fan or turbine)
nouna period or phase of an era, in 中叶 'the middle years of'
proper nounYè / Yip / Ip, a common surname
verb(read xié) to harmonise, to accord — archaic, chiefly in 叶韵
Other pronunciations
xié · hip3 to be in harmony, to accord (an old variant of 協); mainly seen in 叶韵 xiéyùn 'to rhyme, rhyming adjustment in old poetry'. This sense is written 叶 in both simplified and traditional text.
How it is built
compound ideograph
Radical 口. mouth.
口meaning mouth; in the original xié character, mouths speaking in agreement
十meaning ten, i.e. many, or 'united'; the same element appears in 協
Origin
Two different characters share this shape. The traditional word for 'leaf' is 葉: 艹 (grass/plant) over 枼 yè, which supplies the sound and itself depicts thin flat leaves on a tree — the seal form shows 木 with foliage above. Separately, 叶 is an ancient variant of 協 xié 'to harmonise', analysed as 十 (many, joined) plus 口 (mouth): many voices agreeing. When simplified characters were standardised, this rare short character was borrowed to replace 葉 because it was already simple and almost never used, not because of any meaning connection. So the modern 叶 'leaf' has no leaf-like parts at all.
Remembering it
Don't look for a leaf in 叶 — the shape is borrowed. Remember it as 'ten mouths', a stand-in for the leafy traditional 葉 (grass on top, tree at the bottom). If you can see 艹 over 木 in 葉, you can see the plant.
In Cantonese-speaking areas and in Taiwan you will only see 葉; 叶 there is read hip3 and means 'harmonise'. When typing traditional Chinese, do not let an automatic converter turn 叶韵 into 葉韻 — that is a common conversion error. The plain character 叶 is rarely used alone in modern speech; say 叶子 for a leaf.
Context
As a surname it is one of the best-known Cantonese names abroad, spelled Yip, Ip or Yeh. 落叶归根 (luòyè guī gēn), 'fallen leaves return to their roots', is a widely used saying about people returning to their homeland to die or retire. Autumn leaf-viewing (赏红叶) is a popular seasonal outing in China, Japan and Korea.
Ask our advanced Chinese AI about 叶
Anything this page did not answer — how to remember it, how it is used, how it differs from what looks like it.
This page was written by an AI language model and may contain errors, particularly in etymology. Check anything you plan to rely on.
A reference page for every character and common word we have
been asked about: readings, meaning, the words it appears in
and where it came from. Free to read, no account needed.
