Chinese Text Analyzer

How to use the text analyzer

• Paste or type Chinese in the box, or open a .txt file saved as UTF-8. Simplified and traditional both work. The counts under the box update as you type.
• Set your level. Choose the HSK level you have studied up to under My level. The analyzer then tells you how much of the text you already know and marks the words that are new to you.
• Pick a view. Overview shows the words by HSK level and the readability score. Text shows the passage with words marked by level, and prints it. Words and Characters list everything in the text with pinyin, a short meaning and how often it appears.
• Take the words with you. Copy or print a list, download it as a spreadsheet, or download a flashcard file for Anki or Pleco.

Everything runs in your browser. The text you paste is not sent to us or stored anywhere.

How to count Chinese characters and words

Chinese is written without spaces between words, so the length of a Chinese text is usually given in characters (字 zì). Essay limits, translation quotes and reading assignments in China mostly count characters. The counter under the box gives you each of these:

Chinese characters

Every Chinese character, simplified or traditional. Punctuation, letters, digits and spaces are not counted.

Words

Chinese words as the analyzer splits the text (我们 is one word, 去 another), plus each run of letters or digits, such as an English word or a number.

Different characters

How many different Chinese characters the text uses.

Characters with spaces

Everything in the box: characters, punctuation, letters, digits, spaces and line breaks.

Characters without spaces

The same, leaving out spaces and line breaks.

Punctuation marks

Chinese and Western punctuation, such as ，。！？“” and , . ! ?

Sentences

Each stretch of text that ends in 。！？, ! or ? or at a line break.

Paragraphs

Each line that has text in it. Blank lines are skipped.

A word count for Chinese depends on how the text is split into words, and programs split it differently. Microsoft Word, for example, counts each Chinese character as one word, so its word count for Chinese is really a character count. When a teacher or client sets a limit, ask whether they mean characters or words, and whether punctuation counts.

HSK 3.0 levels and word lists

HSK (汉语水平考试, Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì) is China’s official Chinese proficiency test for learners. Its new version, HSK 3.0 (the 2025 syllabus), has nine levels, each with a word list that builds on the one before. Levels 7 to 9 share one list. The analyzer checks every word in your text against these lists.

Counts are rounded to the nearest hundred. A few words are listed at two levels, so the lists hold 10,897 different words. More on what each level means in our guide to the HSK levels.

How the analyzer finds the HSK level of a text

The estimated HSK level is the lowest level whose word lists hold 90% of the text’s HSK words. Names the analyzer recognizes and words that are on no list are left out of that count. A word the lists don’t hold, such as the compound 经济体, counts at the level of its hardest character when all its characters appear in HSK words. If more than 10% of the words are still off the lists, the estimate goes up one level, and a text at HSK 7–9 with more than 25% of its words off the lists shows as Above HSK 9.

The estimate looks at words, not grammar or topic. A short text full of easy words can still use hard grammar, and a text about a subject you know well reads more easily than its level suggests. Treat it as a guide to the vocabulary.

How much of a text you need to know

Studies of learners reading English as a second language link the share of known words to how well a text is understood. Laufer (1989) put the threshold for reasonable understanding at about 95% of the words. Hu and Nation (2000) found that most readers needed about 98% to understand a story well without help. That is the difference between one unknown word in twenty and one in fifty.

Set My level and the analyzer gives this share for your text. It counts only HSK words, so words you know from outside the lists count as unknown, and names are left out. Looking for texts at your level? Try our graded readers, short stories written for each HSK level.

The readability score

The readability score is a number from 0 to 100, where higher means easier for a learner. It is our own measure, made for learners of Chinese, and it adds up five things:

A score of 70 or more reads as easy, 60 to 69 as moderate, 50 to 59 as challenging, and under 50 as advanced. A word is either HSK 1–2 or HSK 3–4, never both, so scores top out at 80, and a whole text of HSK 1 words usually lands in the 70s. Most of the points come from the vocabulary, so the score usually falls as the estimated level rises.

Studying a text with the word list

1. Paste the text and set My level.
2. Open Words and choose Words above my level under Show. These are the words to learn before or while you read, including words that are on no HSK list.
3. Press Download for Anki or Pleco. You get a plain text file with one word per line: the word, its pinyin and its meaning, separated by tabs.
4. In Anki, choose File, then Import, and pick the file; Anki reads the tabs as separate fields. In Pleco, save the file to your phone first, then open Flashcards, then Import / Export, then Import Cards, and choose the file.
5. Read the text once you have reviewed the words.

The pinyin in the list is the reading used in your text: 了 is le after a verb and liǎo in 了解, and 得 is děi in 我得走了. Words keep their dictionary tones, so 不是 is listed as bù shì, the form flashcards and dictionaries use. To see the tones as they are spoken (bú shì), paste the text into our Pinyin Converter.

For teachers

• Check a reading before you assign it. Set My level to your class’s level and see how much of the text they will know.
• Pre-teach the right words. The words above your class’s level (and words on no HSK list), sorted by how often they appear, are the ones worth teaching first.
• Make a handout. Print text in the Text view prints the passage with the new words marked and a glossary of them under it. Print list in Words prints the vocabulary list on its own.
• Adapt a text. Replace the hardest words, paste the new version, and compare the level and score.

About this analyzer

Words and readings

The text is split into words with the same engine as our Pinyin Converter, which uses word frequencies and the CC-CEDICT dictionary and chooses each word’s reading from the sentence around it.

HSK lists

HSK 3.0 (the 2025 syllabus), levels 1 to 9, 10,897 different words. Traditional characters are matched to their simplified forms.

Meanings

From CC-CEDICT, with corrections made by our team.

Limits

Names the analyzer does not recognize count as words off the HSK lists. Each reading of a word has one short meaning, which may not be the one your text uses. Up to 60,000 characters are analyzed at a time. The counter covers any length, though the word count stops at 200,000 characters, and above 20,000 it waits for Analyze.

Updated

November 4, 2026

Found a word with the wrong reading, meaning or level? Tell us the sentence and we’ll check it and fix it.