HSKWin

HSK 3 vocabulary — 500 words to learn

The 500 words the HSK 3.0 syllabus adds at HSK 3, each with the syllabus’s own pinyin and part of speech, an English meaning and audio. Free to read, and no account needed — tap any word to hear it.

500
words HSK 3 adds
1,000
by the end of HSK 3
600
under the retired HSK 2.0
195
very common in everyday Chinese
HSK 3 flashcardsPDF

The full HSK 3 vocabulary list — all 500 words

Sorted by pinyin, twenty words to a page. Every word is in this page already — turning a page only changes what is on screen. Pick a letter on the left to see just that section.

A5

名maternal aunt; step-mother; childcare worker

形(of a person) short; (of a wall etc) low; (of rank) inferior (to); lower (than)

名spouse (PRC); lover (non-PRC)

形quiet; peaceful; calm

形safe; secure; safety; security

B38

量、介classifier: handful, bundle, bunch; classifier for things with handles; to hold; to grasp

动to move (i.e. relocate oneself); to move (sth relatively heavy or bulky); to shift

名class (group of students); grade (in school)

动to move house; to relocate; to remove (sth)

动to take care of (a matter); to deal with (a task, procedure etc); to organize (an event); to establish; to set up; to…

名way of handling sth; means; measure; (practical) solution to a problem

名office; business premises

数量half of the day; a long time; quite a while

动to help; to assist; assistance; aid

形to eat till full; satisfied

名newspaper; newsprint

名north; (classical) to be defeated

名north; the northern part a country; China north of the Yellow River

介quilt; to cover (with); (literary) to suffer (a misfortune)

名notes; a type of literature consisting mainly of short sketches; to take down (in writing)

Words 1–20 of 500 · page 1 of 25 · tap a word to hear it

How many words does HSK 3 add?

HSK 3 adds 500 words to the HSK 3.0 syllabus — 5% of all 11,000 — and brings the total you need to 1,000.

Nouns 名
245
Verbs 动
163
Adjectives 形
58
Adverbs 副
39
Measure words 量
21
Pronouns 代
5
Numbers 数
2
Function words 虚词
22

Which HSK 3 words matter most?

Nothing in the syllabus says which words to learn first — it grades them into nine levels and stops there. So the list measures something outside the exam instead: how often each word turns up in everyday Chinese.

195 of them (39%) are among the most common words in everyday Chinese — roughly one in every ten thousand words you meet. The most common at this level:

  • 为wèi
  • 中zhōng
  • 会huì
  • 被bèi
  • 还huán
  • 国家guójiā
  • 把bǎ
  • 又yòu
  • 或huò
  • 地dì
  • 用yòng
  • 更gèng

And the most common nouns, verbs and adjectives among them — the ones worth learning first:

  • 中zhōng
  • 会huì
  • 还huán
  • 国家guójiā
  • 地dì
  • 用yòng
  • 得dé
  • 得děi
  • 发展fāzhǎn
  • 该gāi
  • 世界shìjiè
  • 认为rènwéi

The three bars are how often the word turns up in everyday Chinese, from wordfreq’s mixed corpus of subtitles, news, books and Wikipedia — three bars is roughly one word in ten thousand. The syllabus itself marks no key words, so this is an outside measure, not an official one, and it counts written forms: a word spelled like a commoner one (等, 打) reads higher than it is.

HSK 3 vocabulary: HSK 2.0 vs HSK 3.0

Under HSK 2.0, HSK 3 added 300 words, for 600 in total. The HSK 3.0 syllabus adds 500 at Level 3 and expects 1,000 by the end of it — 400 more words in total, 1.7 times the old list.

Words, HSK 2.0 against HSK 3.0HSK 2.0HSK 3.0 syllabus
LevelWordsChange
Added at HSK 3
300
500
+200 · ×1.7
Total by the end of HSK 3
600
1,000
+400 · ×1.7

HSK 3 vocabulary FAQ

Is HSK 3.0 the same as HSK Level 3?

No. HSK 3.0 is the version of the exam: CTI published its syllabus in November 2025, in force from July 2026. HSK Level 3 is one of the nine levels inside it — the one this page lists. This page is the HSK 3.0 list for Level 3; HSKWin tracks when each level’s sittings switch to 3.0 on its status page.

HSK 3.0 status tracker

How long does it take to learn the 500 HSK 3 words?

At one round of 20 new words a day — the pace the flashcards deal them — you meet all 500 in about 25 days. They then bring each word back after a day, three days, a week and three weeks, so the last ones need about three more weeks to settle: roughly 7 weeks in all.

Do I need the HSK 1–2 words as well?

Yes. Each level’s list only adds to the ones below it, and the exam assumes all of them: HSK 3 expects 1,000 words in total — the 500 on this page plus 500 from HSK 1–2. Switch the list to “with earlier levels” to see them together.

Why do other lists give a different word count for HSK 3?

Three counts circulate. The old HSK 2.0 asked for 600 words by the end of HSK 3. The 2021 standard (GF0025-2021) gives 2,245 — the figure many sites still quote. The exam syllabus CTI published in November 2025, which this list follows, gives 1,000. The papers are written from the syllabus, so it is the list to learn.

Other HSK vocabulary lists

HSK 1 vocabularyHSK 2 vocabularyHSK 3 vocabularyHSK 4 vocabularyHSK 5 vocabularyHSK 6 vocabularyHSK 7–9 vocabulary
HSK 3 mock testHSK 3 flashcardsHSK 3 reading practice

After a HSK 3 mock test, put your section scores into the HSK score calculator to check the total against the pass mark and see which section the words need to help most.

Word list, pinyin and part of speech: 《中文水平考试（HSK）考试大纲》, published by CTI in November 2025 and in force from July 2026 — 11,000 words, the same document the papers here are built against. English glosses from CC-CEDICT, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. How common each word is comes from wordfreq by Robyn Speer, whose Chinese data is drawn from film subtitles (OpenSubtitles, SUBTLEX-CH by Marc Brysbaert and colleagues, freely available), Wikipedia, news and books, and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Pronunciation plays the word’s own audio clip, generated with a Mandarin text-to-speech voice; where a clip is not available, your browser’s Chinese voice reads the word instead.