Which characters are they?

The most frequent are 的他你我们人在和是耶说不. The site publishes the ranked list, and the 32 characters that occur in all 66 books have a page of their own.

Where should a beginner start reading?

John has the highest share of HSK 1-3 vocabulary (72.3%), and the shortest books — 2 John, 3 John, Philemon — use the fewest distinct characters.

Does pinyin help or hinder?

Both, which is why it is a column you can switch off. Reading with pinyin keeps you moving; turning it off is how you find out which characters you actually know.

971 Characters Cover 95% of the Bible

Q: Which characters are they?

The most frequent are 的 他 你 我 们 人 在 和 是 耶 说 不. The site publishes the ranked list, and the 32 characters that occur in all 66 books have a page of their own.

Answering: “how many characters to read the Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

Character frequency in Chinese follows a steep curve, and Scripture is no exception: a small core carries most of the text. This page states where that curve sits for the Chinese Bible specifically, computed over every character occurrence in the simplified text.

What 95% coverage feels like in practice: roughly one character in twenty is unfamiliar, which is about one per verse at an average verse length of 30 characters. That is comfortable with a tap-to-reveal reader and uncomfortable without one. For unassisted reading, the 1,699-character mark is the one to aim at.

Coverage is not the same as comprehension. Knowing every character in a verse does not mean knowing every word: 22.5% of the Bible's word tokens sit outside the HSK lists, largely names and terms specific to Scripture.

Characters and words needed, side by side

Coverage	Characters needed	Words needed
50%	73	99
80%	355	825
90%	648	1,900
95%	971	3,253
99%	1,699	6,802

Both columns are computed over token occurrences, not over the vocabulary list.

Questions

Which characters are they?: The most frequent are 的他你我们人在和是耶说不. The site publishes the ranked list, and the 32 characters that occur in all 66 books have a page of their own.
Where should a beginner start reading?: John has the highest share of HSK 1-3 vocabulary (72.3%), and the shortest books — 2 John, 3 John, Philemon — use the fewest distinct characters.
Does pinyin help or hinder?: Both, which is why it is a column you can switch off. Reading with pinyin keeps you moving; turning it off is how you find out which characters you actually know.

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).