Chinese text coverage analyzer
Paste any Simplified or Traditional Chinese below. HanziCoverage segments the text, matches each word against the combined HSK 2.0 and 3.0 vocabulary (over 11,000 words, ordered by corpus frequency), and estimates how much of the text a learner at each HSK level would already recognize. It runs entirely in your browser: your text is never uploaded.
What "coverage" means
Coverage is the share of the words in a text that you already recognize. If you know every word in a text except a handful, your coverage is high and the text will feel readable. Reading research commonly cites roughly 95 percent known-word coverage for comfortable extensive reading and roughly 98 percent for comfortable independent reading. Those thresholds are discussed, with sources, on the comprehensible-input guide.
How the tool works
- It segments your pasted text into words using a dictionary-based longest-match pass.
- It looks up each word's HSK level (both the 2.0 and 3.0 schemes) and a corpus frequency.
- It computes your recognized share at each level, counting only Chinese-character words.
- It lists the words above your chosen level, ranked by how common they are, so the highest-value words to learn are at the top.
What to trust, and what not to
- Segmentation is imperfect. Chinese is written without spaces, so any automatic segmenter mis-splits ambiguous strings, names, and words outside its dictionary. Treat coverage as a close estimate, not an exact count.
- Token coverage is not comprehension. Recognizing most words is not understanding every sentence: grammar, idiom, and rare content words carry much of the meaning.
- Frequency is corpus-derived. The frequency ranking comes from a film and television subtitle corpus (a spoken register), which is a strong proxy but not a universal truth.
- HSK membership is a proxy for "known." The tool assumes you know every word at or below your selected level, which no learner does exactly. It is a planning estimate, not a test score.
HanziCoverage is independent and is not affiliated with HSK, Hanban, or Chinese Testing International. Word data is derived from the HSK 2.0 and 3.0 vocabulary lists and CC-CEDICT; the frequency ordering is from the OpenSubtitles 2018 Chinese frequency list (hermitdave/FrequencyWords, CC BY-SA 4.0).