How many characters are in Daniel in Chinese?

12,539 Chinese characters in total, written with 1,093 distinct characters, across 357 verses and 12 chapters.

What HSK level do I need to read Daniel?

57.6% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 72.6% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 21.1% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.

How long does Daniel take to read in Chinese?

About 48 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.

Is Daniel a good book to start with?

Not the gentlest: it ranks 45 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.

Daniel in Chinese: 1,093 Characters

Answering: “how many characters in Daniel in Chinese”

Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON

Daniel combines court narratives from the Babylonian exile with apocalyptic visions, and is written partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic.

Every figure below is counted from the 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script text of Daniel on this site: characters from the simplified text, words from its segmentation, HSK levels from the word lists. The difficulty rank compares this book with the other 65 by the share of word tokens at HSK 1-3.

Daniel in numbers

Measure	Value
Chapters	12
Verses	357
Chinese characters	12,539
Distinct characters	1,093
Word tokens	9,023
Distinct words	1,620
Average verse	35 characters
HSK 1-3 word tokens	57.6%
HSK 1-6 word tokens	72.6%
Not in HSK 1-9	21.1%
Difficulty rank	45 of 66 (1 = easiest)
Reading time	48 min at 260 chars/min
Testament	Old Testament

The words Daniel uses most

#	Word	Occurrences in this book
1	王	207
2	必	136
3	人	111
4	有	92
5	说	83
6	神	78
7	但以理	75
8	要	54
9	一	48
10	事	45
11	国	45
12	来	41
13	梦	41
14	使	40
15	见	38
16	面前	36
17	行	34
18	异象	33
19	尼布甲尼撒	32
20	角	32

Function words excluded. Each word has its own page with pinyin, stroke order and the verses it appears in.

Words that occur in Daniel and nowhere else in the Bible

Words
伯提沙撒素菜眷爱位形战船凌迟赠品紧急四国脚指钦差臬藩法官开光传令琵琶笙圣神丕箍复归伯沙撒位列

31 found, capped at 40 per book.

The easiest chapters of Daniel

Chapter	HSK 1-3	Verses	Characters
Daniel 10	65.1%	21	675
Daniel 12	63.2%	13	424
Daniel 7	62.9%	28	955
Daniel 8	62.8%	27	924
Daniel 4	60.2%	37	1,369
Daniel 9	59.1%	27	1,099
Daniel 1	58.5%	21	665
Daniel 2	57.6%	49	1,661

Read it

Daniel in the parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side. Or take its vocabulary deck first, ordered by how often each word occurs in this book.

Questions

How many characters are in Daniel in Chinese?: 12,539 Chinese characters in total, written with 1,093 distinct characters, across 357 verses and 12 chapters.
What HSK level do I need to read Daniel?: 57.6% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 72.6% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 21.1% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.
How long does Daniel take to read in Chinese?: About 48 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.
Is Daniel a good book to start with?: Not the gentlest: it ranks 45 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.

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: 2026-09-26, 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).