How many characters are in Job in Chinese?

20,857 Chinese characters in total, written with 1,574 distinct characters, across 1,067 verses and 42 chapters.

What HSK level do I need to read Job?

60% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 74.6% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 18.5% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.

How long does Job take to read in Chinese?

About 80 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.

Is Job a good book to start with?

Not the gentlest: it ranks 30 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.

Job in Chinese: 1,574 Characters

Answering: “how many characters in Job in Chinese”

Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON

Job is an extended poetic dialogue on suffering: a righteous man loses everything, and he and his friends argue over why. It ends with a speech from the whirlwind rather than a tidy answer.

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

Job in numbers

Measure	Value
Chapters	42
Verses	1,067
Chinese characters	20,857
Distinct characters	1,574
Word tokens	15,400
Distinct words	2,717
Average verse	20 characters
HSK 1-3 word tokens	60%
HSK 1-6 word tokens	74.6%
Not in HSK 1-9	18.5%
Difficulty rank	30 of 66 (1 = easiest)
Reading time	80 min at 260 chars/min
Testament	Old Testament

The words Job uses most

#	Word	Occurrences in this book
1	人	239
2	神	161
3	说	138
4	有	120
5	要	115
6	必	114
7	使	112
8	能	89
9	若	68
10	岂	67
11	地	65
12	约伯	61
13	谁	61
14	因	60
15	如	58
16	回答	57
17	来	54
18	用	51
19	见	43
20	愿	42

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

Words that occur in Job and nowhere else in the Bible

Words
往返高于水气消解枯辩白细微矿翳雷电草丛瞻望出气明理冰北斗铮

17 found, capped at 40 per book.

The easiest chapters of Job

Chapter	HSK 1-3	Verses	Characters
Job 42	68.2%	17	516
Job 13	67.7%	28	536
Job 23	66.5%	17	333
Job 33	65.8%	33	585
Job 32	64.9%	22	458
Job 17	64.6%	16	329
Job 1	64.2%	22	696
Job 19	63.2%	29	544

Read it

Job 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 Job in Chinese?: 20,857 Chinese characters in total, written with 1,574 distinct characters, across 1,067 verses and 42 chapters.
What HSK level do I need to read Job?: 60% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 74.6% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 18.5% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.
How long does Job take to read in Chinese?: About 80 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.
Is Job a good book to start with?: Not the gentlest: it ranks 30 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).