HSK vocabulary
How many words do you need for each HSK level?
27 October 2026 · 5 min read
Short answer: 500 words for HSK 1, 1,272 for HSK 2, 2,245 for HSK 3, 3,245 for HSK 4, 4,316 for HSK 5, 5,456 for HSK 6 and 11,092 for the advanced levels, HSK 7–9. Those are the official numbers in the HSK 3.0 standard. Here's what each one means in practice.
The numbers
| Level | New words | Total words | Characters |
|---|---|---|---|
| HSK 1 | 500 | 500 | 300 |
| HSK 2 | 772 | 1,272 | 600 |
| HSK 3 | 973 | 2,245 | 900 |
| HSK 4 | 1,000 | 3,245 | 1,200 |
| HSK 5 | 1,071 | 4,316 | 1,500 |
| HSK 6 | 1,140 | 5,456 | 1,800 |
| HSK 7–9 | 5,636 | 11,092 | 3,000 |
Each level includes everything below it — the HSK 4 exam assumes you know the HSK 1, 2 and 3 words too. If you're used to the old HSK, these are much bigger numbers; HSK 3.0 vs HSK 2.0 explains why.
What each level gets you
HSK 1 (500 words). Greetings, numbers, family, time, basic needs. You can ask and answer simple questions and recognise the words that hold sentences together — 的, 是, 不, 了, 在.
HSK 2 (1,272). Everyday life in more detail: shopping, transport, school, work, how you feel and why. Simple conversations on familiar topics start to work.
HSK 3 (2,245). The end of the elementary stage. Most daily situations are covered, and simple texts on familiar subjects become readable — slowly, with the odd unknown word.
HSK 4 (3,245). The intermediate stage begins: opinions, abstract ideas, plans, more formal written words. This is where many learners stall, because the new words are less frequent and harder to meet by chance.
HSK 5 (4,316). Real material — articles, longer conversations, work and study — with words that differ in nuance rather than meaning.
HSK 6 (5,456). Newspapers, discussions, professional life. You're reading for meaning rather than decoding.
HSK 7–9 (11,092). Academic, literary and specialised vocabulary, idioms and formal written Chinese. The last 5,600 words are the long tail: individually rare, together everywhere.
Why the first words matter most
Word frequency in any language is steep. A few hundred very common words make up a large share of everything you'll read or hear, and each new thousand words covers less new ground than the one before. That's why HSK 1 and 2 feel so rewarding, and why HSK 4 and above can feel slow even when you're learning just as much.
It also means order matters. Learn a level's words most-common-first and every session pays off straight away. Every list on this site is sorted that way.
Do you need every word?
For the exam, you'll want close to all of them — a level's test draws from its whole list. For using Chinese, no list is a hard wall: most learners know part of the next level before they finish the current one, and they have gaps below.
So the useful number isn't which level you're "at", but which words you know. Ming's level test finds that in about a dozen questions and starts you where your knowledge ends, picking up the gaps below as you go. For how long each level takes at a few minutes a day, see how long it takes to reach each HSK level.