HSK 3 Covers 59.7% of the Chinese Bible
Answering: “what HSK level to read the Bible”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
The honest answer to "what HSK level do I need" is that no HSK level finishes the job, and a low one gets you further than you would think. HSK 1 alone covers 44.2% of word tokens, because the commonest words carry most of the text.
The ceiling is real: 22.5% of word tokens are outside HSK 1-9 entirely. Those are names (662 words in this text look like proper names), plus the vocabulary of sacrifice, covenant and kingship that a modern proficiency syllabus has no reason to include. They are learned from the text, not from a course.
Coverage is a share of tokens, not of sentences. At 63.2% — HSK 4 — most verses still contain one unknown word, which is why the reader here shows meaning on tap instead of asking you to look words up elsewhere.
| Level | Word tokens known | 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% |
HSK 3.0 word lists; band 7-9 is treated as one level, as the lists themselves do.
Questions
- Which book should I read at HSK 3?
- John (72.3% HSK 1-3), Matthew (68.1% HSK 1-3), 2 John (67.9% HSK 1-3) — the three with the highest share of elementary vocabulary.
- Is there a deck for the words that are not in HSK?
- Yes: the book decks and the topical decks are built from the Bible's own frequency list, so they cover exactly the vocabulary HSK leaves out.
- Where do the HSK levels come from?
- HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
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).