HSK 3.0 word counts by level, and how far old HSK words carry over
The syllabus the new HSK is tested on lists 11,000 words: 300 for level 1 up to 5,400 by level 6, with levels 7 to 9 sha...
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What to call your relatives in Chinese, and why one in five has more than one answer
Of 1,195,740 family relationships up to six steps, about 53% have one standard Chinese term, 20% could be several people...
How many poems are in 300 Tang Poems, and how many Tang poems survive
The Three Hundred Tang Poems holds 320 poems in the editions we counted, and its preface only ever promised "three hundr...
Chinese typing speed in WPM, and why dividing by five gets it wrong
Hong Kong's civil service asks for 15 Chinese characters a minute, which looks tiny beside English speeds only because t...
The most common Chinese typos are homophones
Most Chinese typos are the right sound and the wrong character, picked from a pinyin keyboard's row of candidates. Some...
Who wrote the Zhou Gong dream book, and why copies disagree
No dream book can be traced to the Duke of Zhou. His name most likely came to the genre through a line of Confucius. The...
Do DeepSeek and Qwen need different prompts from ChatGPT
"Avoid adding a system prompt" is the most-repeated rule about prompting Chinese models, and DeepSeek's own current docu...
Chinese character riddles, and how to solve them
一口咬掉牛尾巴 — one mouth bites off the ox's tail. Bite the tail off 牛, put 口 underneath, and you have written 告. Th...
How many tokens is a Chinese character, and what Chinese AI companies call things
Four Chinese model vendors publish the same ratio in their own documentation: a Chinese character is about 0.6 of a toke...
What a seal script converter can and cannot do
Seal script got its own Unicode block on 16 September 2026 — 11,328 characters — and a converter will still leave 的, th...
How to write the amount on a Hong Kong cheque in words
English or Chinese are both accepted, and whichever you write, the words beat the figures. Write HK$10,001 in Chinese an...
When yi (一) and bu (不) change tone, and why pinyin usually doesn't show it
一 is said yí before a fourth tone and yì before the others; 不 becomes bú only before a fourth tone; and a third tone r...
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