# Reading the Chinese Bible: About 59 Hours

> At 260 Chinese characters a minute, reading the whole Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) takes about 59 hours — 3,543 minutes for 921,149 characters.

Question: how long to read the Chinese Bible
Answer: 59 hours
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/how-long-to-read-the-chinese-bible

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.

## 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