Chinese Reading Speed Test: Measure Your Characters Per Minute

The Chinese reading speed test gives you one number: how many Chinese characters per minute you read a passage at. Start the timer, read, stop the timer, and it reports the rate. Then it can turn that into minutes for a chapter of any length you enter.

How the test works

1. Use the practice passage, which was written for the tool, or paste your own text.
2. Press start and read at your normal pace.
3. Press stop when you reach the end.

The rate is the number of Han characters divided by your time, scaled to one minute. Punctuation, spaces, pinyin and numbers are not counted, so a passage with a lot of punctuation does not inflate your result. Everything runs in your browser.

After the result, type the length of a chapter in characters and the tool shows about how many minutes it would take at your speed. That is the practical use: deciding whether a graded reader chapter fits into your lunch break.

What the number means, and what it does not

This article does not quote an average Chinese reading speed, because the test does not provide one and a number from nowhere would only mislead you. Speed depends on how familiar the words are, whether you read aloud or silently, and how often you stop. A passage full of words you have never seen will look like a slow reader even if you are a fast one.

So use the number as a comparison against yourself:

• Read passages of similar difficulty each time, so a change in speed is not just a change in text.
• Do a separate timed attempt after you have looked up the unfamiliar words, rather than timing a read where you stop to search a dictionary. The Reader is built for the looking-up step.
• Check that you understood what you read. The test cannot.

Raising the number

The surest way to read faster is to know more of the words in what you read. To check how much of a text you will recognise before you start, see how hard is a Chinese text, which uses word coverage, and the text analyzer. For habits that make reading a daily thing, read how to build a daily Chinese reading habit and how to read Chinese without pinyin.

Speed is also part of the bigger question of how long reading takes to learn: see how long it takes to learn to read Chinese.