How many characters are in Hosea in Chinese?

6,389 Chinese characters in total, written with 949 distinct characters, across 196 verses and 14 chapters.

What HSK level do I need to read Hosea?

54.4% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 69.3% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 24.6% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.

How long does Hosea take to read in Chinese?

About 25 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.

Is Hosea a good book to start with?

Not the gentlest: it ranks 60 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.

Hosea in Chinese: 949 Characters

Answering: “how many characters in Hosea in Chinese”

Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON

Hosea uses the prophet's own troubled marriage as an image of the covenant between God and Israel.

Every figure below is counted from the 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script text of Hosea 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.

Hosea in numbers

Measure	Value
Chapters	14
Verses	196
Chinese characters	6,389
Distinct characters	949
Word tokens	4,402
Distinct words	1,160
Average verse	33 characters
HSK 1-3 word tokens	54.4%
HSK 1-6 word tokens	69.3%
Not in HSK 1-9	24.6%
Difficulty rank	60 of 66 (1 = easiest)
Reading time	25 min at 260 chars/min
Testament	Old Testament

The words Hosea uses most

#	Word	Occurrences in this book
1	必	144
2	耶和华	54
3	如	47
4	以色列	39
5	以法莲	39
6	人	34
7	说	33
8	使	31
9	神	30
10	因	27
11	要	26
12	民	22
13	地	21
14	王	16
15	犹大	15
16	去	15
17	给	15
18	爱	14
19	埃及	14
20	行	14

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

Words that occur in Hosea and nowhere else in the Bible

Words
倔强

1 found, capped at 40 per book.

The easiest chapters of Hosea

Chapter	HSK 1-3	Verses	Characters
Hosea 2	61.5%	23	734
Hosea 13	57.5%	16	514
Hosea 14	56.9%	9	314
Hosea 6	55.5%	11	303
Hosea 9	54.7%	17	636
Hosea 7	54.2%	16	495
Hosea 4	53.7%	19	574
Hosea 1	53.5%	11	417

Read it

Hosea 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 Hosea in Chinese?: 6,389 Chinese characters in total, written with 949 distinct characters, across 196 verses and 14 chapters.
What HSK level do I need to read Hosea?: 54.4% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 69.3% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 24.6% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.
How long does Hosea take to read in Chinese?: About 25 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.
Is Hosea a good book to start with?: Not the gentlest: it ranks 60 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).