Lamentations in Chinese: 797 Characters
Answering: “how many characters in Lamentations in Chinese”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Lamentations is five poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, four of them acrostics built on the Hebrew alphabet.
Every figure below is counted from the 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script text of Lamentations on this site: characters from the simplified text, words from its segmentation, HSK levels from the word lists. The difficulty rank compares this book with the other 65 by the share of word tokens at HSK 1-3.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Chapters | 5 |
| Verses | 154 |
| Chinese characters | 4,081 |
| Distinct characters | 797 |
| Word tokens | 2,857 |
| Distinct words | 903 |
| Average verse | 27 characters |
| HSK 1-3 word tokens | 59% |
| HSK 1-6 word tokens | 69.6% |
| Not in HSK 1-9 | 23.5% |
| Difficulty rank | 33 of 66 (1 = easiest) |
| Reading time | 16 min at 260 chars/min |
| Testament | Old Testament |
| # | Word | Occurrences in this book |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 耶和华 | 38 |
| 2 | 使 | 38 |
| 3 | 人 | 29 |
| 4 | 因 | 23 |
| 5 | 锡安 | 19 |
| 6 | 民 | 18 |
| 7 | 仇敌 | 16 |
| 8 | 像 | 14 |
| 9 | 说 | 14 |
| 10 | 求 | 13 |
| 11 | 主 | 13 |
| 12 | 要 | 12 |
| 13 | 如 | 11 |
| 14 | 无人 | 11 |
| 15 | 日子 | 10 |
| 16 | 城 | 9 |
| 17 | 敌人 | 9 |
| 18 | 一样 | 9 |
| 19 | 众 | 9 |
| 20 | 受 | 8 |
Function words excluded. Each word has its own page with pinyin, stroke order and the verses it appears in.
| Chapter | HSK 1-3 | Verses | Characters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lamentations 3 | 62.2% | 66 | 1,046 |
| Lamentations 1 | 60.6% | 22 | 936 |
| Lamentations 5 | 57.2% | 22 | 395 |
| Lamentations 4 | 57.1% | 22 | 713 |
| Lamentations 2 | 56.1% | 22 | 991 |
Read it
Lamentations in the parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side. Or take its vocabulary deck first, ordered by how often each word occurs in this book.
Questions
- How many characters are in Lamentations in Chinese?
- 4,081 Chinese characters in total, written with 797 distinct characters, across 154 verses and 5 chapters.
- What HSK level do I need to read Lamentations?
- 59% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 69.6% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 23.5% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.
- How long does Lamentations take to read in Chinese?
- About 16 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.
- Is Lamentations a good book to start with?
- Not the gentlest: it ranks 33 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.
Related reference pages
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 these numbers were produced
- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,021 verses.
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation). A different segmenter gives slightly different word counts; character counts are unaffected.
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute — an assumption about a fluent adult reader, not a measurement.
- Computed: 2026-09-22, from the text on this site.
These are counts anyone can reproduce from the published dataset. They are not a peer-reviewed linguistic study, and the difficulty rankings are one stated formula rather than a validated readability score.
Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike. Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).