How many Chinese characters do you need for TV, novels and the news?
Real subtitles, novels and news, counted character by character.
We make Mandarin The Wild.
The numbers
We counted the characters in 292 Mandarin films and shows, 290 web novels and 200 news articles, and asked how many of the commonest Chinese characters it takes to know each share of them. Each row links to the guide that read those texts.
| What you watch or read | 90% | 98% |
|---|---|---|
| TV shows and films | 1,206 | 2,902 |
| Web novels | 1,552 | 3,432 |
| News articles | 1,039 | 2,389 |
Is 2,500 characters enough?
China's official list of common characters has 2,500, and says they make up about 98% of everyday print.1 That holds for the news: the 2,500 commonest are 98.2% of its characters. It holds less well for TV (97.2%) and least for novels (95.6%), which use the most characters. Its other number, 3,500 characters for over 99% of print, is more than the news needs (3,020 for 99%) but short of TV (3,784) and novels (4,273).
Characters aren't words
Knowing 2,389 characters doesn't mean you can read 98% of the news. The news is built from formal two-character words, and HSK 1–4 words are only about half of an article's words. Knowing both characters in a word often doesn't tell you the word.
我打算今晚看。
to plan; to intend; plan; intention
That is why we count characters here. Words have no resting point: in our films and shows, the different words that make up 98% of what is said rose from 10,475 in the first 25 titles to 26,257 in all 292, and were still rising, as each film brings its own names, places and topic words. Over the same titles, the characters that make up 98% rose only from 1,985 to 2,321.
What to learn first
Readers need about 98% of a text's words to follow it on their own.2 For characters, the first 1,552 take you to 90% of all three kinds, and past that the kinds split: about 2,389 for the news, 2,902 for shows and 3,432 for novels. Words come from the texts themselves, met again and again in what you watch and read.
How we counted
Characters are taken in the order of our frequency list of Chinese web text, so the counts don't depend on how much we read.3 The texts are the ones our guides counted: subtitles of Mandarin films and shows,4; the free opening chapters of web novels,5, 6; and news articles,7, 8. Names the dictionary only knows as names are left out. The middle text of each kind needs about as many characters as the whole sample: 2,573 for 98% of a show, 3,292 of a novel and 2,194 of an article.
Use the chart
The chart is free to use on your own site or in a class, with a link back to this page.
Questions
How many Chinese characters do you need to read a newspaper?
About 2,389. Learned commonest first, they cover 98% of the characters in a Chinese news article, and 1,039 cover 90%. The words they make are harder: news is full of formal words beyond HSK 4.
How many Chinese characters do you need to watch Chinese TV?
About 2,902 cover 98% of the characters in Chinese films and shows, and 1,206 cover 90%. Listening also takes the words and the speed: actors speak about 3.6 characters a second.
Sources
Checked on 26 October 2026. Prices and features change; tell us if one has.
- List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese (1988), with its coverage figures
- Hu and Nation (2000), Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension, Reading in a Foreign Language 13(1)
- FineWeb-2, the web text we counted (its Mandarin part, cmn_Hani)
- Lison and Tiedemann (2016), OpenSubtitles2016: extracting large parallel corpora from movie and TV subtitles, LREC 2016 (the subtitles we counted)
- Jinjiang Literature City (晋江文学城): its book library, the novels we read
- QQ Reading (QQ阅读): its book rankings, the novels we read
- China News Service (中国新闻网): its news feeds and scrolling news, the articles we read
- People’s Daily Online (人民网): its channel pages, the articles we read