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Short answer The HSK sets clear targets: 300 words for level 1, 1,000 by level 3, 2,000 by level 4 and 5,400 by level 6, and 11,000 for the advanced levels 7–9. What these words are worth shows in real Chinese: in film and TV subtitles, the 300 words of HSK 1 make up 54.7% of all words, the 2,000 words up to HSK 4 make up 78.8%, and the 5,400 words up to HSK 6 make up 86.2%. Studies of other languages suggest you need about 95 percent of the words to follow speech with ease and about 98 percent to read with ease, so you keep learning words after HSK 6.
Words per HSK level
The official HSK 3.0 syllabus, published in November 2025, lists the words of every level. Each level adds new words to those of the levels below.
| Level | New words | Words in total | Characters to read in total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 300 | 300 | 246 |
| 2 | 200 | 500 | 371 |
| 3 | 500 | 1,000 | 655 |
| 4 | 1,000 | 2,000 | 1,096 |
| 5 | 1,600 | 3,600 | 1,527 |
| 6 | 1,800 | 5,400 | 1,940 |
| 7–9 | 5,600 | 11,000 | 3,088 |
The steps grow with every level: level 1 asks for 300 new words, level 6 alone for 1,800. Our guide on how long each level takes turns these numbers into days.
How much real Chinese each level covers
To see what the levels are worth outside the exam, we counted how often the HSK words appear in SUBTLEX-CH. This corpus holds 33.5 million words from the Chinese subtitles of 6,243 films and TV series, which makes it close to everyday spoken Chinese.
| Level | Words | Share of subtitle words | Unknown in 20 words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 300 | 54.7% | 9 |
| 2 | 500 | 63.9% | 7 |
| 3 | 1,000 | 71.8% | 6 |
| 4 | 2,000 | 78.8% | 4 |
| 5 | 3,600 | 83.5% | 3 |
| 6 | 5,400 | 86.2% | 3 |
Two things stand out:
- The first words do the most work. The 300 words of HSK 1 already cover 54.7%. The 5,100 words of levels 2 to 6 together add 31.5 percentage points.
- Each level still counts. Every level lowers the number of words you have to guess. That is the difference between following a conversation and losing the thread.
The count uses the words as the corpus splits them. Names count as unknown, and so do words that the corpus splits differently from the HSK list. Many of these words are combinations of two HSK words, such as 一个 (one, a), 看到 (to see) and 很多 (many). Counted as known, they raise the share for HSK 6 to up to 91.2%.
What the percentages mean
Most research on this question comes from English as a foreign language. Hu and Nation (2000) found that readers needed to know about 98 percent of the words in a text to read it without help. Their study had 66 university students, and a replication with 104 learners in 2023 could not fully confirm the figure. For listening, van Zeeland and Schmitt (2013) found that learners understood informal spoken stories well with about 95 percent of the words.
Treat these figures as rough guides, not as hard limits. They show why the last percentage points matter: with 90 percent known words, one word in ten is new, which is one or two words in every longer sentence.
Characters cover more than words
The 1,940 characters in the words of HSK 1–6 make up 97.0% of all characters in the same subtitles. Characters come back in many words, so they cover more text than words do. But a known character is not a known word: 高手 (gāoshǒu, expert) is written with two level 1 characters and is still a level 6 word. Our guide on how many characters you need has the numbers per level.
Which words to learn first
Learn the most frequent words first. The HSK lists follow frequency closely: of the 1,000 most frequent words in the subtitles, 879 are on the list for levels 1–6, and 528 of them are already in levels 1–3. Only 45 words of levels 1–6 never appear in the subtitles at all. Most of them are newer words such as 扫码 (to scan a code), 外卖 (food delivery) and 二维码 (QR code): the corpus dates from 2010.
After HSK 6, the common words of Chinese go on for a long time: the official list of common words in modern Chinese (现代汉语常用词表) had 56,008 entries in 2008 and 56,790 in its second edition. From there, the words you need depend on what you read and watch, so add the words of your own topics.
How Hanzi By Heart helps
Hanzi By Heart has all 5,400 words of HSK 3.0 levels 1–6 and shows you every day which new words come next and which are due for review. You learn every word three ways, reading, listening and writing, each on its own review schedule, so you practise recalling every word instead of only seeing it again. Our guide on spaced repetition explains why the reviews keep words in memory.
Questions and answers
How many Chinese words do I need to be fluent? There is no official number. In subtitles, the 5,400 words of HSK 6 cover 86.2% of all words. Research on other languages suggests about 95 percent for listening with ease, so fluent speakers know well beyond the HSK 6 list.
How many words do I need for HSK 6? 5,400 words in HSK 3.0, counting all lower levels. HSK 2.0 asked for 5,000.
How many words do I need for HSK 4? 2,000 words in HSK 3.0. In film and TV subtitles, they cover 78.8% of all words.
How many common words does Chinese have? The official list of common words in modern Chinese had 56,008 entries in 2008, 40,351 of them with two syllables. Its second edition has 56,790.
Sources
- Center for Language Education and Cooperation: HSK Syllabus (新版HSK考试大纲, vocabulary, characters, grammar; published November 2025, effective July 2026)
- Cai and Brysbaert (2010): SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on film subtitles, PLoS ONE 5(6), e10729
- Hu and Nation (2000): Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension, Reading in a Foreign Language 13(1), 403–430
- Kremmel, Indrarathne, Kormos and Suzuki (2023): Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension: replicating Hu and Nation (2000), Language Learning 73(4)
- van Zeeland and Schmitt (2013): Lexical coverage in L1 and L2 listening comprehension, Applied Linguistics 34(4), 457–479
- Ministry of Education of China: List of Common Words in Modern Chinese, draft (现代汉语常用词表（草案）, 2008), 56,008 entries, 40,351 of them with two syllables
- The Commercial Press: List of Common Words in Modern Chinese, second edition (现代汉语常用词表（第2版）), 56,790 entries
- Coverage: our own count of the official HSK 3.0 word list, levels 1–6, against the SUBTLEX-CH word and character frequencies.