Chinese Bible Grammar by HSK Level
Answering: “what Chinese grammar does the Bible use”
Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON
Every grammar point below is measured against one text: the Chinese Union Version, the 1919 translation that almost every Chinese Bible online still uses. For each one this section says how often it occurs, which books use it most, and which verses are its simplest examples — and where the translation does not use the construction a course teaches, what it uses instead.
Start with these six
The constructions the text uses most. Between them they account for 66,728 clauses, so they are what a page of this Bible is mostly made of.
HSK 112 points
The level page →HSK 24 points
The level page →HSK 34 points
The level page →HSK 43 points
The level page →HSK 52 points
The level page →HSK 64 points
The level page →HSK 72 points
The level page →HSK beyond1 point
The level page →The section in one table
counted — a checked sample, or every match readapproximate — the rule is right most of the timenot counted — the rule could not be trusted, so no number is claimed
| HSK | Points | Marker occurrences | Share of all word tokens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12 | 90,688 | 13.9% |
| 2 | 4 | 11,825 | 1.8% |
| 3 | 4 | 8,434 | 1.3% |
| 4 | 3 | 1,969 | 0.3% |
| 5 | 2 | 7,172 | 1.1% |
| 6 | 4 | 4,752 | 0.7% |
| 7 | 2 | 1,981 | 0.3% |
| beyond | 1 | 289 | 0.0% |
A point's level is the highest HSK level of the point's own function words, as data/dict.json grades them; a word the HSK lists do not grade sends the point to 'beyond'. Marker occurrences count the words a point is built on, and the share is of all 650,628 word tokens in the text — not of sentences, since one clause commonly carries three of these at once.
Questions
- Is the Chinese Bible good for learning HSK grammar?
- For some of it. The particles of HSK 1 are everywhere in the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) — 的, 了, 不, 也, 都 between them account for most of the grammar on any page. What is missing is the modern spoken layer: 很 before an adjective, 正在 for an action in progress, 如果 for a condition. This translation is from 1919 and reaches for the literary word in each of those places.
- Which grammar point is commonest in the Chinese Bible?
- 的 — the attributive particle, at 39,808 clauses — which is unsurprising, since it is also the commonest word in the book.
- Why do some pages here not give a number?
- Because a count that cannot be checked is worse than no count. A construction has to be recognised, not just counted, so every rule on this site was run against a random sample of its own matches and read one by one. Where the rule was right at least 90% of the time the count is published; below 70% it is not published at all, and the page shows the checked sample in its place.
Take it further
- 97 ready-made vocabulary decks — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco or Quizlet.
- Printable 田字格 worksheets — passages with pinyin, meanings and tracing rows.
- The parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side, every word tappable.
- The dataset behind these numbers — plain JSON, free to reuse with attribution.
How this was measured
Edition: Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified). Every figure comes from one pass over all 1,189 chapters and 31,021 verses, 650,628word tokens in total, using the site’s own segmentation. A construction count is published only when a hand-checked sample of the rule that found it was at least 90% correct; between 70% and that it is published as an approximation, and below it no count is published at all. Generated 2026-09-26.