Which script should I learn?

Whichever the readers around you use: simplified in mainland China and Singapore, traditional in Taiwan, Hong Kong and much of the diaspora. The Bible text is the same either way.

Is the 和合本 the same in both?

Yes — it is one translation published in two scripts, which is why a character-by-character comparison is meaningful.

Can I read both side by side?

Yes. 简体 and 繁體 are two of the reader's columns, and they can be shown together with pinyin and your own language.

1,909 Characters Differ Between the Scripts

Answering: “simplified vs traditional Bible differences”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

Both editions are on this site, verse for verse, and 100% of verses carry both — which is what makes this count possible: the comparison is position by position on the same text, not between two different translations.

1,909 of 2,996 means roughly two characters in three are written the same way in both scripts. The differences are concentrated in the commonest characters, so a page of text looks more different than the count suggests.

Nothing else changes. The words, the verse divisions and the pinyin are identical; only the written forms differ. A reader of one script can follow the other with a couple of hundred substitutions, and the reader here can switch columns to compare them line by line.

Simplified and traditional, compared

Measure	Value
Distinct characters (simplified)	2,996
Characters written differently	1,909
Verses carrying both scripts	100%
Verses in total	31,021
Words affected	none — the vocabulary is the same

Questions

Which script should I learn?: Whichever the readers around you use: simplified in mainland China and Singapore, traditional in Taiwan, Hong Kong and much of the diaspora. The Bible text is the same either way.
Is the 和合本 the same in both?: Yes — it is one translation published in two scripts, which is why a character-by-character comparison is meaningful.
Can I read both side by side?: Yes. 简体 and 繁體 are two of the reader's columns, and they can be shown together with pinyin and your own language.

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).