How many characters are in Matthew in Chinese?

27,983 Chinese characters in total, written with 1,415 distinct characters, across 1,069 verses and 28 chapters.

What HSK level do I need to read Matthew?

68.6% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 76.2% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 18.4% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.

How long does Matthew take to read in Chinese?

About 108 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.

Is Matthew a good book to start with?

Yes — it ranks 2 of 66 books from easiest to hardest by vocabulary, so it is among the gentler starts.

Matthew in Chinese: 1,415 Characters

Answering: “how many characters in Matthew in Chinese”

Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON

Matthew presents Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel's scriptures, and gathers his teaching into five great blocks — the Sermon on the Mount among them.

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

Matthew in numbers

Measure	Value
Chapters	28
Verses	1,069
Chinese characters	27,983
Distinct characters	1,415
Word tokens	19,679
Distinct words	2,461
Average verse	26 characters
HSK 1-3 word tokens	68.6%
HSK 1-6 word tokens	76.2%
Not in HSK 1-9	18.4%
Difficulty rank	2 of 66 (1 = easiest)
Reading time	108 min at 260 chars/min
Testament	New Testament

The words Matthew uses most

#	Word	Occurrences in this book
1	说	470
2	人	301
3	耶稣	287
4	要	211
5	来	187
6	有	178
7	去	154
8	给	104
9	门徒	88
10	告诉	81
11	一	80
12	叫	74
13	那里	70
14	就是	61
15	主	59
16	看见	55
17	神	54
18	必	53
19	若	53
20	事	52

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

Words that occur in Matthew and nowhere else in the Bible

Words
亚比玉亚金以律马但稗子薅珠子癫痫阉酉师尊淋

12 found, capped at 40 per book.

The easiest chapters of Matthew

Chapter	HSK 1-3	Verses	Characters
Matthew 25	78.8%	46	1,187
Matthew 20	76.2%	34	842
Matthew 18	71.6%	34	972
Matthew 10	71%	42	1,125
Matthew 11	70.2%	30	816
Matthew 14	70.1%	36	776
Matthew 28	69.6%	20	516
Matthew 13	69.5%	58	1,470

Read it

Matthew 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 Matthew in Chinese?: 27,983 Chinese characters in total, written with 1,415 distinct characters, across 1,069 verses and 28 chapters.
What HSK level do I need to read Matthew?: 68.6% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 76.2% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 18.4% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.
How long does Matthew take to read in Chinese?: About 108 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.
Is Matthew a good book to start with?: Yes — it ranks 2 of 66 books from easiest to hardest by vocabulary, so it is among the gentler starts.

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).