HSK 5 – Vocabulary list and content

By Felipe / Last updated October 22, 2024

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HSK level 5 is the fifth of 6 levels in the official Chinese proficiency test HSK. If you have made it past HSK 4, you have probably decided to embrace the grind and do what it takes to become actually good at Chinese. Let's see what's left for you to do to reach that goal by looking at the next level: HSK 5!

Quick disclaimer: This guide is about HSK version 2.0. An update to the HSK test (version 3.0) has been officially announced in 2021 and brings some significant changes. However, textbooks are still being updated to fit the new curriculum and you can not take the new HSK tests, yet. So for the foreseeable future, the current HSK 2.0 is going to stay relevant.

How many words are in HSK 5?

HSK level 5 introduces 1,300 new words and 621 distinct new characters. That means that you will know a total of 2,500 words and 1,685 characters after HSK 5.

What you will learn in HSK 5

As the sheer amount of content increases compared to the earlier levels, it becomes harder to talk about very specific things that you will learn. Your Chinese already has a strong foundation if you have gotten this far and there won't be any new learnings in HSK 5 that completely change the way you speak Chinese.

That being said, HSK 5 continues what HSK 4 started and introduces a lot more ways of saying almost the same thing but in different contexts and with different connotations. On the one hand, this is great for building the passive vocabulary required to understand native content. You can just look up the English definition in an online dictionary and get a good feeling for what a certain word means. On the other hand, you really have to know the differences between similar words if you want to use them yourself.

Furthermore, as writing starts to take up a bigger portion of the HSK exams, you will also need to be able to distinguish between words that are 口语 (kǒuyǔ, colloquial/spoken) and 书面 (shūmiàn, formal/written). Examples are 以及 (yǐjí) vs. 和 (hé) and 便 (biàn) vs. 就 (jiù). While you can probably get away with using the informal version in a formal context, the reverse will sound very strange in daily conversations.

There are many more grammar points covered in HSK 5, but listing them all goes beyond the scope of this article. A great resource for these kinds of things is the Chinese grammar wiki.

What studying HSK 5 will feel like

By now, you probably know what an enormous undertaking Chinese learning is. The good thing is that you already have a lot of experience under your belt by the time you tackle HSK 5. Regardless of whether it took you half a year or 5 years to get here, you have most likely established a sustainable Chinese learning process that works for you.

Furthermore, you should be able to give a rough estimate of how long it will take you to learn the words in HSK 5 based on your experience. For example, if you know that you can sustainably learn 10 new words every day, you can in theory work your way through the vocabulary in 130 days. However, this assumes that you spend your learning capacity of 10 new words per day entirely on HSK 5 vocabulary. That is not something I would personally recommend because working through textbooks for half a year easily turns your brain into a puddle of mud and sucks every bit of joy out of the process. So make sure to sprinkle in activities that you enjoy, like watching simple TV shows or talking to natives (if you have the opportunity).

A positive thing about studying HSK 5 is that you will feel like you have entered an elite circle of Chinese learners. It's a bit sad, but not very many people ever make it this far in their Chinese learning journey. I don't have any hard numbers on this but I would guess that only a small fraction of Chinese learners (maybe 10-20%?) makes it past HSK 4. On the flip side, this means that it becomes increasingly hard to find more advanced learners to learn from. Furthermore, impostor syndrome can become a real issue if everyone always tells you that your Chinese "must be soo good" while you are still struggling to successfully apply your Chinese in daily life. Don't let that get to you. You don't need to prove anything to anyone.

Closing thoughts

HSK 5 is the highest HSK exam I have taken and I personally think it was the right thing to do. It's always good to have very concrete goals, like "I want to read this book", "I want to sing this song", "I want to watch this TV show", or "I want to get this certification". Seeing a light at the end of the tunnel can help keeping the motivation up during the many hours of crunching vocab when you feel like you are not getting anywhere. So if receiving a certificate that proves that you know more Chinese than most Chinese learners is something that gets you going, sign up for an HSK 5 exam several months from now (depending on your estimated learning speed) and go for it.

Reaching HSK 5 also marks a certain amount of formal education that I would recommend any serious Chinese learner to get. Don't get me wrong, only following the HSK curriculum does not really mean that you will become fluent in Chinese. The 1,685 characters you know after HSK 5 are still far from the roughly 3,000 characters you need to know to read native content fluently. However, HSK 5 equips you with all the grammar and language rules you need to start diving into native material. From there on out, you can just learn the words you need to know to consume the content you are interested in.

Until next time, happy learning! 🚀