How long as a learner rather than a native reader?

Two to four times longer, depending on how much you look up. The figure here is a native-pace baseline, not a prediction about you.

The reader speaks any verse or chapter with your device's Chinese voice and highlights each word as it goes.

Reading the Chinese Bible: About 59 Hours

Answering: “how long to read the Chinese Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

The assumption is stated because it does all the work: 260 characters a minute is a fluent adult native pace. A learner reading with pinyin and tapping for meanings should expect two to four times longer, which puts the whole Bible somewhere between five and ten months at half an hour a day.

Split over a year that is 4 chapters a day, or about 9.7 minutes of native-pace reading. The New Testament alone is a far smaller commitment — see the table.

Every book page on this site prints its own reading time using the same pace, so the plan can be built book by book instead of from a single total.

Book by book the numbers are smaller than the total suggests: the shortest book takes 2 minutes, the Gospel of John 91, and the whole New Testament about 14 hours.

Reading time at 260 characters a minute

Part	Characters	Minutes	Hours
Whole Bible	921,149	3,543	59
Old Testament	699,012	2,688	45
New Testament	222,137	853	14
Gospel of John	23,643	91	1.5

Questions

How long as a learner rather than a native reader?: Two to four times longer, depending on how much you look up. The figure here is a native-pace baseline, not a prediction about you.
How long is the shortest book?: 2 John: 2 minutes.
Is there audio?: The reader speaks any verse or chapter with your device's Chinese voice and highlights each word as it goes.

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).