# How Long to Learn to Read the Chinese Bible

> Covering 95% of the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified)'s word tokens means learning about 3,253 words — roughly 11 months at ten new words a day, or 3 months to reach 80%.

Question: how long to learn to read Chinese Bible
Answer: 11 months at 10 words a day
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/how-long-to-learn-to-read-it

Ten words a day is the assumption, and it is a deliberately modest one — a spaced-repetition session of ten new cards plus reviews takes ten to fifteen minutes. From there the arithmetic is simple, and it is the arithmetic that makes the case: 825 words for 80% coverage is a few months, not a few years.

Order matters more than volume. Learning the Bible's own frequency list is worth several times learning the same number of words from a general syllabus, because 22.5% of the tokens here are outside HSK entirely. One book at a time is better still: a book deck front-loads exactly the words that book repeats.

The plan that follows from the numbers: pick the easiest book, learn its top 150 words, read it with pinyin on, then read it again with pinyin off. Then take the next book — the vocabulary overlap means the second book costs less than the first.

## Words to learn, and how long at ten a day

| Target coverage | Words | Days | Months |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 50% | 99 | 10 | 0.3 |
| 80% | 825 | 83 | 2.8 |
| 90% | 1,900 | 190 | 6.3 |
| 95% | 3,253 | 326 | 10.8 |

Ten new words a day is an assumption, not a measurement; reviews are on top of that.

## Questions

**Do I need to write the characters?**

Not to read. Writing helps recall, and the site generates 田字格 practice sheets for any word, but reading progress does not depend on it.

**Which deck should I start with?**

The deck for John, or HSK 1 if you are starting Chinese from scratch — HSK 1 alone covers 44.2% of the Bible's word tokens.

**Can I use Anki instead of this site?**

Yes. Every deck exports to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV, with pinyin, meaning, HSK level and real verses from the Bible.

## Method

- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation)
- 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)
- Computed: 2026-09-22

These are reproducible counts over a public-domain text, not a peer-reviewed study. Difficulty ranks are one stated formula, not a validated readability score.


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- 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).
- Bible text: public domain — 和合本 · World English Bible · Louis Segond 1910.
- Built with https://chinese-bible.com