How many characters are in Nahum in Chinese?

1,486 Chinese characters in total, written with 569 distinct characters, across 47 verses and 3 chapters.

What HSK level do I need to read Nahum?

51.3% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 66.5% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 24.5% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.

How long does Nahum take to read in Chinese?

About 6 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.

Is Nahum a good book to start with?

Not the gentlest: it ranks 64 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.

Nahum in Chinese: 569 Characters

Answering: “how many characters in Nahum in Chinese”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

Nahum is a poem on the fall of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital whose reprieve Jonah had resented.

Every figure below is counted from the 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script text of Nahum 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.

Nahum in numbers

Measure	Value
Chapters	3
Verses	47
Chinese characters	1,486
Distinct characters	569
Word tokens	1,093
Distinct words	537
Average verse	32 characters
HSK 1-3 word tokens	51.3%
HSK 1-6 word tokens	66.5%
Not in HSK 1-9	24.5%
Difficulty rank	64 of 66 (1 = easiest)
Reading time	6 min at 260 chars/min
Testament	Old Testament

The words Nahum uses most

#	Word	Occurrences in this book
1	尼	20
2	必	16
3	人	14
4	耶和华	11
5	微	10
6	使	10
7	说	7
8	多	7
9	如	6
10	狮	6
11	因	5
12	有	5
13	去	5
14	报	4
15	仇敌	4
16	谁	4
17	保障	4
18	不再	4
19	灭	4
20	施	3

Function words excluded. Each word has its own page with pinyin, stroke order and the verses it appears in.

Words that occur in Nahum and nowhere else in the Bible

Words
掐死

1 found, capped at 40 per book.

The easiest chapters of Nahum

Chapter	HSK 1-3	Verses	Characters
Nahum 3	56.2%	19	577
Nahum 1	51.2%	15	492
Nahum 2	43.9%	13	417

Read it

Nahum 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 Nahum in Chinese?: 1,486 Chinese characters in total, written with 569 distinct characters, across 47 verses and 3 chapters.
What HSK level do I need to read Nahum?: 51.3% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 66.5% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 24.5% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.
How long does Nahum take to read in Chinese?: About 6 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.
Is Nahum a good book to start with?: Not the gentlest: it ranks 64 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).