How Long to Learn to Read the Chinese Bible
Answering: “how long to learn to read Chinese Bible”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Ten words a day is the assumption, and it is a deliberately modest one — a spaced-repetition session of ten new cards plus reviews takes ten to fifteen minutes. From there the arithmetic is simple, and it is the arithmetic that makes the case: 825 words for 80% coverage is a few months, not a few years.
Order matters more than volume. Learning the Bible's own frequency list is worth several times learning the same number of words from a general syllabus, because 22.5% of the tokens here are outside HSK entirely. One book at a time is better still: a book deck front-loads exactly the words that book repeats.
The plan that follows from the numbers: pick the easiest book, learn its top 150 words, read it with pinyin on, then read it again with pinyin off. Then take the next book — the vocabulary overlap means the second book costs less than the first.
| Target coverage | Words | Days | Months |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50% | 99 | 10 | 0.3 |
| 80% | 825 | 83 | 2.8 |
| 90% | 1,900 | 190 | 6.3 |
| 95% | 3,253 | 326 | 10.8 |
Ten new words a day is an assumption, not a measurement; reviews are on top of that.
Questions
- Do I need to write the characters?
- Not to read. Writing helps recall, and the site generates 田字格 practice sheets for any word, but reading progress does not depend on it.
- Which deck should I start with?
- The deck for John, or HSK 1 if you are starting Chinese from scratch — HSK 1 alone covers 44.2% of the Bible's word tokens.
- Can I use Anki instead of this site?
- Yes. Every deck exports to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV, with pinyin, meaning, HSK level and real verses from the Bible.
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).