Chinese text analyzer
Paste Chinese text. Get its character count, the HSK level it sits at, and the characters that are above that level. Nothing is uploaded — the analysis runs in your browser.
Analyzer
Up to 50,000 characters.
Chinese characters
0
Unique characters
0
HSK level
—
All characters
0
Character coverage by HSK level
Every Chinese character in your text, filed under the lowest HSK level that introduces it. Percentages are of Chinese characters, counting repeats.
| Level | Characters | Share | Cumulative |
|---|
Characters above HSK 6
Not in any HSK 1-6 list, most frequent first. Proper nouns and technical terms usually land here, which is why a high count is not automatically a hard text.
HSK vocabulary matched
Reading time
How the level is decided
The tool reports the lowest HSK level at which at least 90% of the Chinese characters in your text are covered by the HSK 1-6 character sets. If no level reaches 90%, it says the text sits above HSK 6.
Two choices in that sentence are worth stating plainly, because they are what makes the answer reproducible rather than a black box:
- Characters, not words. Word segmentation in Chinese is itself an estimate, and two segmenters disagree on real text. Characters are countable without judgement, so the number does not depend on which segmenter this page happens to use.
- 90%, counting repeats. Coverage is measured over every character occurrence, not over the distinct set. A text that repeats ten easy characters and uses one rare one reads easily, and token-weighted coverage reflects that where a distinct-set count would not.
Each character is filed under the lowest level that introduces it, so the six buckets do not overlap and “within HSK 1-3” is the sum of the first three rows.
The word lists behind it
Levels come from the HSK 2012 (HSK 2.0) official word lists — 4995 words containing 2663 unique characters. HSK 2012 is used because it is the version with a published, stable list at every level; the 2021 HSK 3.0 syllabus does not have an equivalent single authoritative machine-readable list, so a level derived from it could not be checked against a source.
| Level | New words | New characters |
|---|---|---|
| HSK 1 | 150 | 174 |
| HSK 2 | 151 | 173 |
| HSK 3 | 297 | 270 |
| HSK 4 | 598 | 447 |
| HSK 5 | 1300 | 621 |
| HSK 6 | 2499 | 978 |
| Total | 4995 | 2663 |
Source: hskhsk.com (Alan Davies) — HSK Official 2012 word lists, retrieved 2026-08-24 from https://hskhsk.com/word-lists.html.
The dataset this page ships is regenerated by scripts/build-hsk-data.mjs. The
generator checks upstream per-level counts against the official totals and stops
regeneration if they exceed the documented tolerance.
What this tool does not do
- It does not add pinyin or translate. A per-character pinyin reading would be wrong on exactly the characters that matter most — 的, 了, 不, 一, 中 all have several readings chosen by context — so this page does not guess at them.
- It does not claim to be a proficiency test. It measures the text, not the reader. Two people reading the same HSK 4 passage can have completely different experiences of it.
- It does not count words the way a Western word counter does. Matched HSK vocabulary is a floor: anything outside the HSK lists — names, places, technical terms — is not matched.
Using the result
The practical read on the coverage table is the gap between your own level and the text's. If you are comfortable at HSK 3 and a passage reports HSK 5, the characters listed above HSK 6 are not your problem — the HSK 4 and 5 rows are, and they are usually a short enough list to learn deliberately before reading.
To read a passage with lookups in place, paste it into HSK Studio (see the product page or the comparison with Pleco, Readibu, and Dong Chinese). To drill the characters the table surfaces, Fulin Flashcard schedules them with spaced repetition. Related reading: how many characters you need to read Chinese, choosing reading material by HSK level, and what the HSK levels actually mean.
Questions
How does this tool decide the HSK level of a text?
It reports the lowest HSK level at which at least 90% of the Chinese characters in your text are covered by the HSK 1-6 character sets. The threshold and the underlying word lists are published on the page, so the number can be reproduced by hand.
Which HSK syllabus is used?
The HSK 2012 (HSK 2.0) official word lists: 4995 words and 2663 unique characters across levels 1-6. HSK 2012 is used because it is the version with a published, stable word list for every level.
Does the text I paste get uploaded anywhere?
No. The analysis runs entirely in your browser with JavaScript. The text is never sent to a server, and nothing is stored after you close the tab.
Is the character count the same as a word count?
No, and the difference matters in Chinese. This tool counts characters, which is the unit Chinese word-count requirements are usually written in. It also reports how many distinct HSK vocabulary words it can match in the text, which is a floor rather than a true word count, because words outside the HSK lists are not matched.
Why does it separate unique characters from total characters?
Total characters tell you how long a passage is. Unique characters tell you how much you actually need to know to read it. A 1,200-character article often uses only 300-400 distinct characters, which is why re-reading familiar material is cheaper than it looks.
Found a case where the level looks wrong? Send the passage to hello@fulinlabs.com and it can be checked against the published lists.