Are the non-HSK words hard?

Not individually — they are just unlisted. They repeat far more often inside Scripture than an HSK 6 word does, so they are learned quickly from reading.

Which HSK list is this?

HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.

Is there a deck for exactly these words?

The book and topic decks are built from Bible frequency, not from HSK, so they cover this vocabulary directly.

22.5% of Bible Words Are Not in HSK

Answering: “Bible words not in HSK”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

HSK is a proficiency syllabus for contemporary Mandarin, so it has no reason to include 耶和华 or 祭司. The gap it leaves is measurable: 22.5% of the 663,876 word tokens in the text, drawn from a vocabulary of 11,168 distinct words.

Most of it is names. 662 of the words here read as proper names by their dictionary gloss — people, peoples and places, transliterated character by character for sound. The rest is the vocabulary of worship, sacrifice and law.

The practical consequence: a course gets you to 71.4% and no further, and the remainder has to come from the text. That is what a Bible-specific deck is for, and it is a small list compared to an HSK level — the words repeat constantly once you meet them.

Where the words come from

Source	Share of word tokens
HSK 1-3	59.7%
HSK 4-6	11.7%
HSK 7-9	6.1%
Not in HSK	22.5%

Questions

Are the non-HSK words hard?: Not individually — they are just unlisted. They repeat far more often inside Scripture than an HSK 6 word does, so they are learned quickly from reading.
Which HSK list is this?: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
Is there a deck for exactly these words?: The book and topic decks are built from Bible frequency, not from HSK, so they cover this vocabulary directly.

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).