Reading guide
Chinese graded readers by HSK level
Leon·Updated September 24, 2026·7 minA graded reader is a text adapted to a vocabulary size. The HSK label on it tells you roughly which words it avoids, not whether you can follow it.
Dengdeng is our reading app. Each story comes in Easy, Medium, and Hard, roughly HSK 3.0 levels 1–3, 3–4, and 5 and up. The table also lists readers we do not make.
What graded means
A graded reader keeps the vocabulary inside a list, keeps sentences short, and drops the rare names and idioms that would stop you every second line.
There are two ways to make one.
Fiction series are written from scratch for a word count. Chinese Breeze and Mandarin Companion work this way, and so do the stories in Du Chinese.
Adapted readers start from a real text and rewrite it for a level. The Chairman's Bao does this with news.
Dengdeng publishes stories about real life in China, each written at three levels.
Both kinds get labelled with an HSK level. The label is an approximation. HSK 3.0 is a curriculum list of 10,937 words chosen by a committee, not a frequency list, so an HSK 3 text from one publisher can be harder than an HSK 4 text from another.
What each band can read
The coverage column is from our HSK level study. It is the share of word occurrences in 33.5 million words of film and TV subtitles found on that band's list, counting every repetition. It describes everyday speech, not writing, and it is not a percentage of meaning.
| Band | Everyday speech covered | What a text at this level looks like | What to read |
|---|---|---|---|
| HSK 1 | 60% | Textbook dialogues. Names, numbers, family, a few verbs. | Your coursebook, or a fiction series graded by word count. |
| HSK 2 | 72% | Short narratives with past and future. Simple connectors. | Beginner fiction series. Dengdeng Easy on a subject you already follow. |
| HSK 3 | 79% | Connected paragraphs. This is where a story about real events becomes readable. | Dengdeng Easy. Du Chinese intermediate. The Chairman's Bao at HSK 3. |
| HSK 4 | 82% | The written register starts to show: for "should", for "and", longer noun phrases. | Dengdeng Medium. News readers at HSK 4. |
| HSK 5 | 85% | Near-native text with only the rarest words trimmed. | Dengdeng Hard. Original articles on a familiar topic, with lookup. |
| HSK 6 | 87% | Original articles. | Native sources with a dictionary. An adapted reader when you want to read faster. |
| HSK 7–9 | 90% | Formal and specialist writing. | Native reading. |
Coverage rises fast and then barely moves. HSK 1 alone covers 60%, and the whole 7–9 band, 5,597 words, adds under four points. That is the case for starting a reader early rather than finishing a level first.
Writing needs far more words than speech, which is why graded readers exist at all. To cover 80% of everyday speech you need about 844 distinct words. To cover 80% of news text you need roughly 6,692. The numbers are in Spoken vs written Chinese.
Why the label is a rough guide
Coverage counts the glue words. Knowing 79% of the word occurrences in a paragraph can still leave you without the one verb that says whether the thing happened.
Topic matters as much as the band. Someone who follows electric cars will get through a piece about a BYD launch at a level that would stop them in a piece about pension reform, because half the meaning comes from what they already know.
Publishers grade differently. A fiction series that counts characters, a course app that counts words, and a news reader that targets an HSK list will not agree on what "level 3" means.
Use the label to narrow the choice. Use the first paragraph to decide.
How to check the level
Open the text and hide the translation.
- Read the first paragraph once, without looking anything up.
- Say what happened in one sentence of English. Who did what, and did it work.
- If you can, keep reading. Look up only the words that block the action.
- If you know the topic but keep losing who did what, look up the connecting words and read it again.
- If you are translating every phrase and still cannot say what happened, go down a level, or change to a subject you already know.
The beginner roadmap has a eight-sentence reading check if you want a fixed test instead of a paragraph from a text you chose.
Fiction or real events
Fiction series have a plot to come back to. The vocabulary is controlled from the first page to the last, and nothing in the plot depends on knowing the world outside the book.
Stories about real events cover things you may already know from an English headline, which makes the Chinese easier to follow. The words you learn are the ones people in China are using this month.
Pick the kind you are more likely to open tomorrow. We compared the two kinds of reader in Dengdeng vs Du Chinese and Dengdeng vs The Chairman's Bao.
The same story at three levels
Most readers give you one level per text. If it is too hard, you find another text.
Dengdeng publishes each story at three levels, so you can change the difficulty without changing the subject. Start at Easy, read the paragraph, and move to Medium when Easy feels slow.
Tap a word for pinyin and meaning. The words you tap are saved for practice, common words first, and come back as flashcards and fill-in-the-blank exercises.
One story from each daily edition is free in the app on iOS and Android, five stories from the archive open up each week, and today's edition has short previews on the web.
Common questions
What HSK level do you need for a graded reader?
Around HSK 2 for beginner fiction and HSK 3 for stories about real events. Check the first paragraph rather than the label: if you can say what happened, the level is right.
Is HSK 3 enough to read Chinese news?
Not the original articles. HSK 3 covers about 79% of everyday speech and much less of news writing. It is enough for a graded story about real events, with word lookup.
What is the difference between a graded reader and simplified news?
Simplified news is one kind of graded reader. Fiction series are written for a level from the start. Simplified news is adapted from a real article, so it is graded by rewriting rather than by writing.
How many words do you need to read Chinese comfortably?
For everyday speech, about 6,900 distinct words cover 95% of what is said. For news text, the same 95% needs about 40,000. A graded reader removes the rare words, so you can read one long before you can read the original.
Try today's edition at the level you can follow, and tap a word.
