Have you heard of the HSK? It’s short for Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (汉语水平考试), a well-known Chinese test for international learners. The test is administered by the Confucius Institute, and it’s widely used by Chinese companies and universities to assess foreign candidates’ Chinese skills.
A new version of the HSK test was recently released, along with required vocabulary lists for each of the six new levels. We’ve taken these lists and come up with a list of the Chinese characters you need to know at each level, which we’ve linked with our stroke order animations and information from the nciku dictionary in a similar way to our random character generator. Click on a level to see the list of characters that first appear at that level, or on a character to see its stroke order, pronunciations, meanings and more.
We love to hear your comments, so if you’ve got anything to say about this or any other aspect of nciku please let us know!
NOTE: the character detail box here shows all the meanings of a character, but in some cases not all of these meanings are needed for the HSK test. More common meanings of a character have been shown first, so in most cases those are the ones you need.
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74 responses so far ↓
1 Lauren Austin
Mar 9, 2011 at 5:48 pm
This is a great service — please keep up the good work! I will study these words!
2 Paulina
Mar 10, 2011 at 9:22 am
Great idea! Thanks for the lists, they are going to help me a lot to prepare the exam.
3 Lin
Mar 10, 2011 at 2:54 pm
嘿，这些汉字一点儿也不难嘛!
A little advice, how about to connect these words, I mean include these words in some sentences. Maybe this would let learners remember more easily? Take HSK1 as an example:
我的爸爸喜欢喝茶。In this sentence the characters are all included in HSK 1, if nciku could give a list of sentences that include those characters for learners to remember, maybe these 汉字 would not look like so disorderly?
I don’t know, I can’t feel your pains,
4 ki
Mar 10, 2011 at 10:41 pm
This is great!!!! Thank you so much!!!!
5 myla
Mar 11, 2011 at 12:02 am
谢谢！非常有用。。。
6 Kevin
Mar 11, 2011 at 12:18 pm
@Lin you can see example sentences for a character if you click the link to go to the entry detail page. Or do you mean that we should add example sentences that only contain characters below a certain HSK level?
7 kim
Mar 11, 2011 at 5:14 pm
very savvy! this will surely help =p
8 Lin
Mar 11, 2011 at 5:25 pm
@Kevin, I mean only use this these characters to make sentences, but maybe this is too complicated? Especially for the levels above HSK 3. I just want make those characters have some connection so that learners won’t feel they are so disorderly.
Like, maybe you could use ten sentences to includes all characters in HSK 1, so if learners can remember these ten sentences, then they will know all characters, as well grammar.
Have I made that clear? :S
9 Kevin
Mar 11, 2011 at 6:10 pm
@Lin Thanks, I think I understand now - you mean something like a Chinese version of “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” (sentence that includes all letters in English)?. I guess we could do something like that, thanks for the idea.
Having said that, I think you can’t really learn all characters just from knowing one word with that character in. For example, even if I learn the word 先生 there’s not much connection to the individual meanings of 先 and 生.
10 Lin
Mar 11, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Ah, right, I forgot that…先生、先前、生活。。。there will have a lot of sentences. Anyway, I just feel when we are little kids, we didn’t only remember these characters without 联想。If learners have a 画面感， they will recall these characters quickly when they are nerveous, such as during a exam.
Well, just a casual thought…nevermind…
11 Michael
Mar 14, 2011 at 2:22 am
If you made this into an iPhone app, it would hands down be the best way to practise character writing for the HSK. An app with interactive character writing on the touchscreen and dynamic sentence games to practise the characters for each level. I wouldn’t hesitate to pay 50$ (even 100$) for an app like that.
12 terroir
Mar 17, 2011 at 3:16 pm
I’m at level 5.5. And that can’t be right
13 terroir
Mar 17, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Also, level 6 is just about six times longer than level one. Which means that the difference between levels is not sequential, but exponential. Very fair. It’s like playing the last level of Metal Slug.
14 Kevin
Mar 17, 2011 at 4:14 pm
@Terroir the new version of the HSK test has been criticized for seriously reducing the number of words and characters you need to know at each level. They tried to make it focus more on grammar and understanding rather than vocabulary, but lots of people say it’s too easy compared to the old version.
Hanban has some mock questions from each level on their site (follow the link in the original post), so you can see which HSK test is really the most appropriate for you.
And yes, the vocabulary lists are exponential - level 1 has 150 words, and each subsequent level has about twice as many as the previous level, until you get to level 6 with 5000 words. The character lists aren’t quite exponential, because a lot of the new words at each level are made up entirely of characters from previous levels.
15 S'porean student
Mar 23, 2011 at 9:51 pm
In fact all these characters aren’t that hard to learn, most Chinese students have familiarised themselves with all the words at level 6 at the age of 10. So don’t be under the impression that these words are too tough!
16 Amanda
Mar 30, 2011 at 11:02 am
S’porean student. Not hard to learn is relative. Chinese students have also been hearing and seeing these characters all their lives. Some people start learning at an older age. Young children learn differently than adults do. Our brains are at different developmental stages. I am not saying that we should get discouraged, but when you say that children the age of 10 know all these characters could be discouraging for some people who feel stupid because they aren’t getting even level 1.
17 Daren
May 27, 2011 at 3:40 pm
@Amanda. I disagree, honestly I think if you put your mind to it, the adult brain learns much faster. No excuses!
18 Frank
Jun 14, 2011 at 7:33 am
I partly agree with both Amanda and Daren. Kids’ language acquisition skills are exceptional and effortless. But adults possess something that can be very useful: discipline.
@Kevin, thank you for your hard work on this site.
19 Find out how many Chinese characters you know with our Hanzi Vocabulary Counter
Sep 2, 2011 at 5:07 pm
[…] you want to expand your character vocabulary, you might find our HSK Characters page useful - it gives the list of characters you need to know for each level of the HSK test. […]
20 Alison
Sep 28, 2011 at 7:58 am
This is really nice, but it would be even better if you could enter a search with the pinyin for a character and find the stroke animation/meaning/tones etc. that way. That would be extremely user-friendly and helpful!!
21 Kevin
Sep 28, 2011 at 5:28 pm
@Alison a separate character dictionary with this information is on our “we’d like to do this when we get time” list, but until then the nciku.com dictionary has animations for single-character entries (click the link in the detail page header area), and supports pinyin search.
It’s not quite as focused as this page, but the information is all there.
22 Amy
Oct 8, 2011 at 2:00 am
According to HSK Level 1 dagang, there are 150 words. There are 176 characters listed for level 1 on this site. May I ask how these characters were chosen? Based on what reasons?
23 Kevin
Oct 8, 2011 at 11:29 am
@Amy to make these character lists we just took the list of words required for each HSK level and created a list of every character that’s found in those words. There are more than 150 characters at level 1 because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters.
Only Hanban (the HSK organizers) know exactly why each word was chosen, but it’s roughly based on how common the words are, with extra priority for words that are more useful for people learning Chinese.
24 siva
Oct 9, 2011 at 10:02 pm
nice work
25 Character HSK Level Indicator
Oct 11, 2011 at 11:53 am
[…] you found our list of Chinese characters by HSK level useful, you might also like this new tool: an HSK level indicator that colors Chinese characters […]
26 NZone
Oct 11, 2011 at 10:10 pm
it is very interesting and easy to learn thanks much
27 Birgit
Nov 4, 2011 at 2:59 pm
This is great - is there also a list with the characters in traditional chinese?
28 pat
Nov 14, 2011 at 7:44 am
Great help, thanks a lot!
Just a little detail: you list 176 characters for level 1. However, Hanban officially indicates that level 1 includes 178 characters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSK_test )
Of course it’s a tiny detail, but I was curious if you knew where the discrepancy comes from?
29 Kevin
Nov 14, 2011 at 11:05 am
@Birgit the HSK test was created by the Mainland China government, so it uses Simplified characters. I guess it should be possible to create a Traditional version, but it wouldn’t be official and I don’t know anywhere that has this list.
@Pat our data comes from taking the required vocabulary lists for each level and making a list of every unique character at that level. I don’t know where the figure in the Wikipedia article comes from - it doesn’t appear to be from the official HSK site, and the user that added it didn’t cite any sources.
30 pat
Nov 15, 2011 at 7:32 am
@Kevin
Thanks!
Another question: your characters seem to be pretty much ordered by order of decreasing frequency. Which reference list are you using to order them? I understand there seems to be (logically) different frequency statistics depending on the sources and type of litterature considered. I was wondering if there was any such list which could be more of a ‘reference’ than others.
31 Kevin
Nov 15, 2011 at 10:50 am
@pat I’m afraid I don’t know where the character frequency list originally came from - it’s been on our internal server for years, since before I joined nciku. I can’t claim that it’s more official than any other character frequency list you might come across online.
32 pat
Nov 18, 2011 at 9:32 pm
another 2 questions come into mind:
- Where can we find the official lists of Words (not characters) needed for each HSK level? (that is, the 150 words for HSK 1, etc.)
I found downloadable lists at http://lingomi.com/blog/hsk-lists-2010/ which does find 150 words for level 1 but it’s not too official.
There is a resource at http://hskpedia.com/by_pinyin, but it lists 148 words.
Is there something more trustworthy? It seems that you have gathered this info on your own website, since you list all words appearing in the HSK levels for each character. But I can’t find an easily viewable list.
- Is there on your website a searchable database of characters? Here we have all characters by level, but i was wondering how to find a given characters from its pinyin version, for example.
33 Dennis
Nov 19, 2011 at 9:15 pm
The stroke order animation no longer works. The box is black so can’t see anything. Also levels 5 &6 - nothing happens when I click on a character. OK for the other levels 1-4.
34 Dennis
Nov 22, 2011 at 5:21 am
Thanks to the help team - problem fixed: needed update version of Adobe Flash player.
35 pat
Nov 25, 2011 at 12:13 am
Hi Kevin,
I think I discovered why Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSK_test) mentioned 178 characters for level 1, instead of your 176.
The different is that they include the additional characters 几 (ji3) and 后 (hou4).
And indeed, from the list at the end of the PDF: http://www.confuciusinstitute.qut.edu.au/docs/hks_2010_level_1.pdf, it appears that 几 and 后面 are among the official 150 words.
Who is wrong? Is this PDF link an outdated reference, or have these 2 characters indeed been misplaced into level 3 in your list?
36 Kevin
Dec 8, 2011 at 12:08 pm
@Pat you seem to be right - I’m not sure how it happened, but there seem to be some mistakes in our data. We’re busy with other projects at the moment, but we’ll try to correct it as soon as possible.
37 niko
Dec 14, 2011 at 5:10 pm
Hi! These are really useful.it would be great to have a list from English to Chinese too!
38 ravi
Dec 27, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Very useful. Thank you
39 ANURA
Jan 14, 2012 at 8:35 am
This will help me to improve my Chinese language knowledge. Thank you.
40 pat
Jan 16, 2012 at 7:09 am
Hi Kevin,
So I have taken a close look at your lists for levels 1 and 2. Here are the mistakes that I found:
LEVEL 1:
几 and 后 are missing (they are indeed part of the first 150 words HSK1)
姐 is wrongly labeled are level 1: it belongs in fact to level 2.
=> instead of your 176 characters, you should add 2 and remove 1 (correct total: 177)
LEVEL 2:
11 characters are missing:
事, 从, 元, 向, 姐, 情, 知, 累, 要, 近, 道
(these are all part of words appearing in level 2)
2 characters are wrongly labeled as level 2 and should not be listed here: 圆 and 马
=> instead of your 163 characters, you should add 11 and remove 2 (correct total: 172)
Could you please correct the lists? I haven’t gone through levels 3, 4, 5, 6, but if you can start correcting those lists as well, it would be great!
Thanks!
41 Kevin
Jan 21, 2012 at 10:42 am
@Pat I do keep meaning to do this, so please don’t think I’m ignoring you, I’ve just been busy with other things.
42 pat
Jan 27, 2012 at 7:20 am
@Kevin Sure! I didn’t mean to insist: just wanted to help with the revision, since I dug quite carefully into the first 2 levels so far.
43 Virginia
Feb 19, 2012 at 8:33 pm
Thank you for this service.
I would like to ask if you could add a character search?
I need to study certain characters and have trouble locating a specific one in all the lists.
Thank you again
44 Ruth
Feb 20, 2012 at 12:52 am
This is a great way to test how many Chinese words I know (apparently, not many). It would be great if I can click on the speaker button next to the character to know how it is pronounced. Thanks.
45 Robert
Feb 20, 2012 at 1:33 pm
this list is awesome @_@
46 Javier
Feb 22, 2012 at 7:41 am
This is the best page in the world!!haha!
Nciku is my personal 中文老师!
Gracias!
谢谢!
47 Margarida
Mar 1, 2012 at 1:57 am
Thank you very much for this wonderful help!
It will be very helpful to me for the preparation to the HSK examination!
Muito obrigada!
谢 谢
48 ashot
Mar 29, 2012 at 3:51 pm
hey!!! thanks for the list.
i have a question: is the quantity of these characters correct for each levels? i’m asking because if i counted right, your level 1/2/3 has 176/163/277 (176/336/616 - in total with previous ones) characters while wikipedia’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_Shuiping_Kaoshi) list is a lil’ bit different (178/349/623 - in total with previous ones).
didn’t count other levels but i guess they are different too.
49 Pat
Mar 30, 2012 at 10:28 pm
@ashot
You are right: you can check my comments above (number 35 and 40) mentioning a few mistakes in this list. I get to totals of 177/172 for levels 1/2 (still slightly different from Wikipedia, but the total for level 2 corresponds at 349).
I haven’t dug through level 3 to be sure…
50 ashot
Apr 1, 2012 at 2:30 am
ah ok, i can see you’ve already discussed thats…well, but still not fixed
51 Fran
Apr 7, 2012 at 4:30 am
Hi, thanks for compiling this list! is it possible to format/extend list 6 so that you don’t have to scroll up and down to see the pinyin and definition? Thank youuu
52 Olivia
Apr 19, 2012 at 10:45 pm
hello,
this is a really great tool - thank you!
Is it possible to search for the animation using pinyin if you want to learn how to write a particular character?
Thanks again,
Olivia
53 ashot
Apr 28, 2012 at 10:58 pm
Kevin!!!
could you please compile all or at least for first time 1-4 levels into flash format (both - characters and the net on the background, not apart) so we could launch these great animations on the TV or another electronic devices?
thanks a lot!
54 Ordine di scrittura dei caratteri | Il SinoNauta – Cinese per autodidatti
May 16, 2012 at 2:11 pm
[…] scoperto ieri il sito http://blog.nciku.com/blog/en/2011/03/09/hsk-character-list-and-stroke-order-animations/ Si tratta di un ottimo link in quanto viene riportata la correta sequenza di scrittura per i […]
55 Aso
May 18, 2012 at 1:29 am
Pat, I also compared characters listed here with vocabulary lists from that website (http://lingomi.com/blog/hsk-lists-2010). It differs not only from the list above but also doesn’t have exact match with Wikipedia. Cumulative number of characters is 178/349/623/1074/1711/2633 while Wikipedia claims 1071 and 1709 for levels 4 and 5 (level 6 fits).
By the way, how did you find that 姐 is level 2? It appears at level 1 both here and in vocabulary lists.
56 Sean
Jun 7, 2012 at 1:44 am
Thank-you for putting the lists of characters up.
Does anyone know why Hanban does NOT make simple “official” lists of characters available on the web?
Perhaps they think they do… in the PDF they post about each exam… towards the end of the PDF… is a list of words… alphabetical by pinyin.
But I was lucky to even find that…
57 HSK – Listes des mots et caractères – Niveau 1 à 6 | | MaikeximuMaikeximu
Jun 8, 2012 at 6:45 pm
[…] Nciku HSK Character Lists […]
58 阮氏芳
Jul 7, 2012 at 1:01 am
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59 Aso
Jul 29, 2012 at 5:30 pm
By the way, may somebody explain how to write correctly this two characters?
亮: lower elements are connected like 几 or disconnected like 儿?
起: right element has closed space like 巳 or is opened like 己?
Depending on fonts, I frequently see both variants for both characters. It is correct to write it in any way?
60 Araks
Aug 29, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Hi Aso!
Look))
亮: 几
起: 己
It isn’t correct to write it in any way. You must write it as it is.
Good luck!
61 laksika
Sep 8, 2012 at 8:19 pm
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62 gaara
Sep 11, 2012 at 11:14 pm
Is there traditional characters also? I’m so curious to learn more..
63 对外汉语教学相关网站、手机应用软件推荐 | 对外汉语-信息分享
Jan 6, 2013 at 10:12 am
[…] http://blog.nciku.com/blog/en/?p=1870 此链接提供HSK 1-6级词汇的笔顺演示，包括HSK所涉及到的该词义项。 […]
64 Laszlo
Jan 19, 2013 at 4:28 pm
Hi,
I am looking for in grass writing style a characters as well as its stroke orders of my artistic name “Perfect Lucky”, which is also a buddhist name.
I also want to carve it in traditional seal characters.
Thanks,
Laszlo
65 Laci
Feb 7, 2013 at 6:24 pm
Huh, what is it?
Rather
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66 Pat
Feb 22, 2013 at 7:39 am
Hello everyone. I’ve been commenting on this thread about some mistakes in the characters list. Now I have made the full analysis myself (extracting each individual character from the lingomi lists) and all detailed character lists for each level have been displayed in the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSK_test (see the expanding list in the Reference section at the end).
I can’t guarantee that it is 100% correct, but it at least corrects many of the mistakes which have been identified in the lists above.
It is unlikely that the new Wikipedia lists have any mistakes, but it is not impossible either, so feel free to comment if you find any issue.
67 catskincatskin (莫莫)
Feb 24, 2013 at 12:16 pm
This is fantastic. Thanks to all involved!
What is the relationship between this list (and the similar list at wiki article on HSK) to the tool on this cite that gives an estimate of how many characters one knows?
I’m curious about the other 2,000+ characters that the HSK doesn’t test, whether perhaps I’m misunderstanding, and whether or not this site has those characters listed somewhere as well.
Thanks!
68 Hacking Chinese Characters Challenge
Mar 4, 2013 at 7:15 pm
[…] the moment, my goal is to learn how to write the characters of the HSK list, at least up to level four (that is more than 1,000 characters). Even if I’m already able to […]
69 La sfida dei caratteri cinesi di Hacking Chinese
Mar 5, 2013 at 7:08 am
[…] il momento il mio obiettivo è quello di imparare a scrivere i caratteri della lista HSK, almeno sino al livello quattro (più di mille caratteri in tutto). Anche se sono già in grado di […]
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