How hard is this Chinese text?

How the grade is worked out

The text is split into words with the same segmenter as the HSK Analyzer, and every word is looked up in the six HSK lists. The lists leave out many everyday compounds — 吃饭, 火车, 今年 — so a word written entirely in characters the lists have already used counts at the level where its last character first appears, and is labelled “HSK n characters”. For each level the page counts how much of the text a reader at that level already knows. The grade is the lowest level at which no more than 1 word in 20 is new — the point where a text is readable with a dictionary to hand. Comfortable, unassisted reading needs closer to 1 in 50, which is commonly cited as the threshold for reading without help.

It is a grade from vocabulary, not an average of word levels: one HSK 6 word in a paragraph of HSK 1 does not make it an HSK 3 text, and a reader does not feel it that way. Grammar, sentence length and the topic also make a text harder, and no word count can see them, so treat the grade as the vocabulary you need, not a promise it will be easy.

Names, typos and rare characters the dictionary cannot read are kept in the count as new words rather than dropped — dropping them would make every text look easier than it is. Very short texts are not graded at all.

Questions people ask

What HSK level do I need to read a Chinese newspaper?

Paste a real article and see. News usually grades beyond HSK 6 because of names, places and specialist terms, even when most of its everyday words sit in HSK 4–5.

How is this different from the HSK Analyzer?

The HSK Analyzer colours every word of your text by level and lists what you are missing at your level. This checker answers the question before that one: what level is the text itself, and how long will it take. The “What next” button sends your text straight to the analyzer.

Is my text stored?

No. It is analysed in memory for this one answer and not saved, logged or shared. There is no account and nothing to sign up for.