Does that mean HSK study is wasted?

No — HSK 1 alone covers 44.2% of the text. It means HSK order is not the fastest route through *this* text.

Why Pearson rather than a rank correlation?

Because HSK level is a coarse 1-7 scale with huge ties, and a rank correlation on ties is harder to read. The figure is a weak-positive indicator, not a precise estimate, and it is published as one.

What should I study instead?

A book's own frequency list: the 3,754 words of Isaiah already cover 90% of the whole Bible.

HSK Order Explains Little of Bible Frequency (r 0.312)

Answering: “does HSK order match Bible frequency”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

HSK levels order vocabulary by what a learner of contemporary Mandarin needs; Bible frequency orders it by what Scripture actually uses. This page measures how far the two agree: Pearson correlation between a word's HSK level and its frequency rank in the Bible, over the 4,175 words that have both. The answer is 0.312 — positive, so HSK level does track Bible frequency a little, and weak, so it cannot be used as a substitute for it.

That is not a criticism of HSK. It is the arithmetic behind a practical decision: studying HSK levels in order gets you 59.7% of this text by HSK 3 and stalls at 77.5%, because 22.5% of the word tokens here are on no HSK list at all. A list built from the Bible's own frequencies reaches the same coverage with far fewer words.

The honest use of both: HSK for the grammar and the everyday core, a Bible frequency list for the rest. The decks on this site exist in both shapes for exactly that reason — six by HSK level, and the rest ordered by how often each word occurs in the text.

Coverage by HSK level, and what is left

Level	Word tokens covered	Still unknown
HSK 1	44.2%	55.8%
HSK 2	53%	47%
HSK 3	59.7%	40.3%
HSK 4	63.2%	36.8%
HSK 5	67.5%	32.5%
HSK 6	71.4%	28.6%
HSK 7-9	77.5%	22.5%
Not in HSK at all	22.5%	—

Correlation between HSK level and Bible frequency rank: 0.312 over 4,175 words.

Questions

Does that mean HSK study is wasted?: No — HSK 1 alone covers 44.2% of the text. It means HSK order is not the fastest route through *this* text.
Why Pearson rather than a rank correlation?: Because HSK level is a coarse 1-7 scale with huge ties, and a rank correlation on ties is harder to read. The figure is a weak-positive indicator, not a precise estimate, and it is published as one.
What should I study instead?: A book's own frequency list: the 3,754 words of Isaiah already cover 90% of the whole 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).