HSK StudioTools

    Which characters carry this text?

    Every character in your text, ranked by how often it turns up, with the running total beside it. The curve is steeper than people expect, and that is the whole argument for learning frequent characters first.

    Your text

    0 Chinese characters

    Preparing HSK default… 1%

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    Why the running total is the interesting column

    Character frequency in Chinese follows a very steep distribution. In most ordinary prose the hundred most common characters account for somewhere near half of everything on the page, and a thousand get you past 90%. The rank of a single character tells you little; the cumulative column tells you where the effort stops paying.

    That is also the honest argument against learning characters in stroke order or by radical group. Frequency order is unglamorous and it front-loads the return.

    Characters are not words

    Knowing 电 and 脑 does not mean knowing 电脑, and knowing 电脑 does not mean you can read 电子 or 脑子. Character coverage overstates what you can read, sometimes badly, which is why the level reported by the HSK level checker is computed over words instead.

    The level shown against each character here is the lowest HSK level of any word this text uses it in — so it reflects how this character is being used in your text, not its difficulty in general.

    This is your text, not a corpus

    Everything here is counted from what you pasted. That makes it the right tool for "which characters do I need for this book" and the wrong tool for "which characters are common in Chinese" — a short passage will happily tell you that a character appearing twice is in the top ten. For general frequency, a published corpus list is what you want.

    The other Chinese tools

    Same engine, same dictionary, different question. Whatever you pasted here works in all of them.