Chinese Character Counter

Paste Chinese text to count characters instantly, and see which HSK 3.0 levels those characters come from. Nothing is uploaded — the counting happens in your browser.

Chinese characters

Unique characters

All characters

0:00

Read aloud

Without spaces

Punctuation

Digits

Latin words

Paragraphs

Which HSK levels are these characters from?

Type something above and every distinct character you use is matched against the official HSK 3.0 word list.

Also free: pinyin converter · stroke order and practice sheets · HSK text analyzer

Why character count, not word count

Chinese is written without spaces, so a normal word counter has nothing to split on: some editors count every character as a word, others count a whole paragraph as one. That is why Chinese exams, publishers and word limits are all expressed in characters (字). The big number above is that count.

Free to use, no account needed.

What each number means

Chinese characters — every character in the Han script, counted with repeats. This is the number a Chinese word limit refers to.
Unique characters — the same text with duplicates removed. A 500-character essay by a beginner often uses fewer than 200 distinct characters, and the gap between the two numbers is a decent proxy for how repetitive a text is.
All characters — everything you pasted, including spaces, punctuation and any English. Useful when a form limits total input length rather than Chinese characters.
Read aloud — an estimate only, based on 240 characters per minute. Your own pace will differ.

How the HSK level breakdown works

The official HSK 3.0 word list (2025) contains 11,000 words, and those words are built from 3,088 distinct characters. Each of your distinct characters is matched against that set. A character is labelled level N when the earliest HSK word that contains it is level N — so 餐 counts as HSK 3 because 餐厅 is an HSK 3 word, even though 餐 is not a standalone entry. Characters that appear nowhere in the list are shown separately; a handful of those is normal, a page full of them means the text is well above HSK level.

Frequently asked

Does it work with traditional characters?: The counting does — traditional characters are Han script and are counted normally. The HSK breakdown does not: the official word list is published in simplified characters, so traditional forms show up as beyond the list.
Is my text sent anywhere?: No. The character table is downloaded once with the page and the counting runs entirely in your browser, which is also why the numbers change while you type.

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Why character count, not word count

Free to use, no account needed.

What each number means

Chinese characters — every character in the Han script, counted with repeats. This is the number a Chinese word limit refers to.

Unique characters — the same text with duplicates removed. A 500-character essay by a beginner often uses fewer than 200 distinct characters, and the gap between the two numbers is a decent proxy for how repetitive a text is.

All characters — everything you pasted, including spaces, punctuation and any English. Useful when a form limits total input length rather than Chinese characters.

Read aloud — an estimate only, based on 240 characters per minute. Your own pace will differ.

How the HSK level breakdown works

Frequently asked

Does it work with traditional characters?

The counting does — traditional characters are Han script and are counted normally. The HSK breakdown does not: the official word list is published in simplified characters, so traditional forms show up as beyond the list.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. The character table is downloaded once with the page and the counting runs entirely in your browser, which is also why the numbers change while you type.