The exam board has published the syllabus for the new HSK, and it is not the document everyone spent four years preparing for. We compared it with the 2011 exam word by word.
Every figure on this page comes from the official HSK 考试大纲 (HSK Test Syllabus) published by the Center for Language Education and Cooperation, cross-checked against the vocabulary and character lists on chinesetest.cn. Earlier versions of this article, and most guides still online, were based on the 2021 Chinese Proficiency Standards instead. That document guided the exam but never defined it, and its word counts are much higher.
The most visible change is the addition of three new levels, 7, 8 and 9, grouped into three stages:
Levels 7 to 9 share a single exam, described in the syllabus as 一卷三试, "one paper, three tests". Your score decides which of the three levels you are awarded.
The nine levels are grouped into three stages, and the labels have shifted. On the 2011 exam, Level 6 was the advanced ceiling. On the new exam, Level 6 sits in the middle band:
These are labels. Chinese is not getting harder; the criteria by which each title is awarded have changed. If you passed HSK 6, your Chinese did not get worse the day the syllabus was published.
The exam board has published the structure and sample questions for Levels 1 to 6. Here is the shape of each paper:
Question counts per section. Times include filling in your details, and exclude the speaking exam, which is taken separately.
Two things stand out. Level 1 has no writing section at all, so it is purely listening and reading. And the papers get long: Level 6 runs to about two hours for 82 questions, against 40 questions in 40 minutes at Level 1.
Here is what each level actually asks for, alongside the 2011 exam and alongside the 2021 framework figures that most articles still quote:
If you have been dreading a 1,260-word HSK 2, you can stop. That number, and the whole middle column above, comes from the 2021 Chinese Proficiency Standards. It is a fine description of what a learner can do at each level, but it was never the exam syllabus, and the exam board did not adopt its word counts.
The real jump is meaningful but ordinary: roughly double at Levels 1 to 4, about 40% at Level 5, and almost nothing at Level 6.
Total counts hide the more useful question: of the words in the new level, how many do you already know? We compared every list word by word.
Read the "kept" column and the picture is reassuring. 97% of HSK 2.0 Level 1 survives into the new Level 1, and Levels 2, 3 and 4 all keep more than 93% of their words. The new exam is largely the old exam with more on top.
Level 6 is the exception, with 1,825 words leaving. Almost none of them are gone, though. They have been promoted into the new Levels 7 to 9, which is exactly what you would expect when three harder levels get added above.
Across all six levels of HSK 2.0, only 138 words leave the HSK entirely.
A further 11 (北京, 长城, 黄河 and the like) moved into the syllabus's separate annex of proper nouns and culture terms, so they are still examinable.
This is worth dwelling on, because the framework's cuts were the most alarming thing about it. It dropped 501 words of the old HSK from the syllabus altogether, including some that made people wonder what the exam was becoming: 声调 (tone), 拼音 (pinyin), 亚洲 (Asia).
The actual exam syllabus restored 395 of those 501 words, all three of those examples included. 先生 and 喂 are both back in Level 1. So is 玩, which the framework had swapped for the erhua form 玩儿.
The same goes for chengyu. The framework looked like it was gutting them; the exam simply moved them upstairs. HSK 2.0 Level 6 contained 121 four-character idioms. The new Level 6 has 26, but Levels 7 to 9 carry 456.
The removals that stuck are mostly modernisation. 照相机 is gone, replaced by 相机 and 拍照 at Level 3. 电子邮件 is gone, replaced by plain 邮件. 传真 survives, but demoted from Level 4 to Level 6, which feels about right for a fax machine.
What replaced them is the vocabulary of daily life in China now: 打车 and 地铁 at Level 2, 外卖, 高铁 and 快递 at Levels 3 and 4, then 扫码, 支付, 网购, 线上 and 线下, 环保, and by Level 6, 人工智能 and 低碳.
Expand any level below to see both sides of the change: which words left that level and where they went, and which words arrived and where they came from. Every word links to its dictionary entry.
The two directions answer different questions. Moved out tells you what you can stop revising, or what is now examined later than you expected. Moved in tells you what has landed on your plate, either promoted down from a harder level or added to the HSK for the first time.
146 of the 150 words introduced at HSK 2.0 Level 1 stay at Level 1, and 4 leave. Coming the other way, 74 arrive from another level and 80 are new to the HSK.
70 of the 150 words introduced at HSK 2.0 Level 2 stay at Level 2, and 80 leave. Coming the other way, 42 arrive from another level and 88 are new to the HSK.
233 of the 301 words introduced at HSK 2.0 Level 3 stay at Level 3, and 68 leave. Coming the other way, 59 arrive from another level and 208 are new to the HSK.
509 of the 600 words introduced at HSK 2.0 Level 4 stay at Level 4, and 91 leave. Coming the other way, 96 arrive from another level and 395 are new to the HSK.
858 of the 1,300 words introduced at HSK 2.0 Level 5 stay at Level 5, and 442 leave. Coming the other way, 145 arrive from another level and 597 are new to the HSK.
704 of the 2,500 words introduced at HSK 2.0 Level 6 stay at Level 6, and 1,796 leave. Coming the other way, 240 arrive from another level and 856 are new to the HSK.
Levels 7 to 9 are new, so nothing "stays". Of the 5,600 words at this level, 1,676 come up from the old exam and 3,924 are new to the HSK entirely.
If you are tracking your vocabulary with Hack Chinese, you can see exactly which words you already know from each new level. Read more about analysing vocabulary lists.
The syllabus is built from five modules: vocabulary (词汇大纲), characters (汉字大纲), grammar (语法大纲), topics (话题大纲) and tasks (任务大纲). Grammar is graded across all nine levels, just as vocabulary is.
We are not going to invent numbers for this section. The exam board has published the vocabulary list and the character list as full annexes, and we have compared both here. The grammar annex has not been released in the same way, so any article giving you a precise count of grammar points per level is quoting the 2021 framework, not the exam.
What can be said from the published materials: a few things that used to be carried as vocabulary are now handled as grammar. 虽然…但是, 因为…所以, 不但…而且 and 只有…才 no longer appear in the word lists at all. They have not left the exam, they moved to the module where they belonged, which is why the older analyses that counted them as "deleted words" were misleading.
We will update this section when the grammar annex is published.
Yes, and we now know exactly how much. Previous versions of this article argued handwriting probably would not make the jump from the standards into the exam. The syllabus settles it: there is a character module (汉字大纲) that splits every character into two lists, the ones you must read and the smaller set you must write by hand.
Both columns are cumulative.
The important detail: the writing requirement is a published, bounded list. You are not asked to write every character you can read. At Level 1 there is no writing at all. At Level 6 you must write 700 characters while reading 1,940, and even at Level 9 the writing list stops at 1,200 against 3,088 you must recognise.
This is the question that matters, and the official sample papers answer it. It is from memory, from the very first level that tests it.
There is no copying task anywhere in the exam. The Level 2 writing section gives you a sentence with a gap, marks the missing word in pinyin only, and asks you to produce the character:
HSK 3.0 Level 2, writing, part 2
Nǐ xiǎng hē chá háishi hē kāfēi？
你想喝（ ? ）还是喝咖啡？
Answer: 茶
At Level 3 the same task appears, and a second part asks you to write a whole sentence from a picture and a prompt word. From Level 4 the section is renamed 写作 (composition) and becomes continuous prose: five picture-and-word sentences plus a short essay of at least 80 characters. Level 5 asks for a 100-character picture story and a 200-character argumentative essay. Level 6 asks for 150 and 300 characters.
So the 书写 character list is not decoration. Those are the characters you can be asked to produce with nothing but a sound to go on, and from Level 4 up you need enough of them to write an essay under time pressure.
One caveat we cannot yet resolve: the HSK is offered on paper and on computer. The sample papers show the tasks but not the input method, so whether computer-based candidates type these answers in pinyin, as they could on the 2011 exam, is not something the published materials state. If they can, the practical burden at Levels 4 to 6 is much lighter than it looks.
Either way, you will sometimes see it claimed that writing begins at Level 5. That is not what the syllabus says. The 书写 list starts at Level 2, and so does the writing section.
This is a real change in what you have to study, and it is the one we got wrong last time. We have written before about why most learners should not spend heavily on handwriting, and that still holds for people learning Chinese to use it. For people sitting this exam, it no longer does.
Two additions matter more than the character counts.
Speaking is no longer optional. From Level 3 upwards, the written exam and the corresponding speaking exam are registered and taken together. On the 2011 exam, the HSKK speaking test was a separate credential most candidates skipped.
Translation is tested at the advanced levels. The syllabus describes five skills rather than four: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation, with the last appearing at Levels 7 to 9.
The syllabus's topic and task modules (话题大纲 and 任务大纲) describe the situations you should be able to handle at each level. They are useful context for teachers building a course, but they change little about how you revise.
If you sit the HSK today, you are sitting the 2011 exam. Test dates through 2026 continue to use HSK 2.0, and the exam board's own materials still describe the six-level exam as the current one.
From 13 December 2026, the two are not expected to run in parallel: HSK 3.0 replaces HSK 2.0 rather than joining it. Certificates you already hold remain valid.
The December date comes from testing centres and from Chinese Testing International, not from a dated notice on chinesetest.cn. Treat it as firm enough to plan around but confirm with your test centre before booking.
If you are just getting started with Mandarin, study the HSK 3.0 lists. Any exam you sit will almost certainly be the new one, and at Level 1 the two lists overlap by 97% anyway, so there is nothing to lose.
If you are sitting an exam before December 2026, prepare with the HSK 2.0 lists. That is the exam you will actually take. If you have time to spare, spend it on the new words at your level rather than on the ones being promoted out of it.
If you are aiming at Level 5, 6, or above, switch to the HSK 3.0 lists now. This is where the two exams diverge most, and where the extra 1,000 to 1,500 words will take real time.
If you are preparing for Level 2 or above, add character production and speaking practice to your plan. Both are now examined, and neither is something you can cram in the final month. From Level 4 the writing section becomes essay writing, so practise composing, not just recalling.