To become a Clerical Assistant in Hong Kong's civil service, a candidate needs a Chinese word processing speed of 15 words per minute, alongside 20 in English. The "word" in the Chinese test is a character, 字. Fifteen a minute looks like a very low bar next to English typing speeds, where a large online study of about 168,000 volunteers found an average of 51.56 words per minute. Taiwan's TQC certificate, run by a private foundation, starts its first level at the same 15 characters and calls 80 "professional". A 2012 study of 419 students at three Singapore secondary schools, typing a textbook passage for two minutes, found a median of 21.5 characters a minute.
Those figures look small only because they are counted in a different unit. We measured the unit. In running text a Chinese character typed in Hanyu Pinyin takes about 2.8 letters, or about 3.6 to 3.8 keystrokes once choosing the character is counted. On that basis 60 characters a minute is about 43 to 46 English words a minute by keystrokes, and about 40 English words a minute of the same meaning. It is not the 12 you get by dividing by five.
Dividing by five
An English "word" in a typing test is not a word. It is five keystrokes, including spaces and punctuation, a convention the text-entry researcher I. Scott MacKenzie sets out in his note on calculating typing speed. Converting Chinese characters a minute into words a minute by dividing by five treats one character as one keystroke, which it almost never is.
The other rule of thumb online goes the opposite way, saying a character carries two or two and a half English words. Applied to 60 characters a minute, the two rules give 12 and 150 words a minute, more than ten times apart. Neither comes with a measurement, and ours contradicts both.
Counting letters
To measure what a character costs, we took every word in SUBTLEX-CH, a word-frequency list built from 46.7 million characters of Chinese film subtitles, looked up each word's pinyin in context, and weighted it by how often it occurs. We corrected one systematic misreading: the software read 了 on its own as liao, where in running text it is almost always the particle le.
Full pinyin came to 2.84 letters a character. Most characters take two or three letters; only one in five takes four or more. A 2001 lab study of pinyin typing states 4.2 letters a character without giving a source, and no weighting we tried came close; the highest was 3.14. Zhuyin, the phonetic script used in Taiwan, works out to about 3.1 keys a character because each syllable needs a tone key, and shuangpin schemes, which type every syllable in exactly two keys, come to about 2.7 once choosing words is counted. Our guide to Zhuyin and pinyin explains the two scripts, and typing a character in Wubi covers a shape-based method, where the count works differently. Every keystroke figure here is for a pinyin typist.
Choosing characters
Spelling a character is not the slow part. In that 2001 study by Wang, Zhai and Su, twelve people typed a 39-character paragraph. Keying the pinyin took them 40.3 seconds on average and the whole job 85.1 seconds, which is 27.5 characters a minute. Picking the right character from the candidates took longer than spelling it, and the reaction of choosing alone took 36% of the time. Most typos happen at that step too, when the right sound is picked as the wrong character from the row of candidates. Input methods have improved since, with whole-sentence prediction, and a 2017 study of university students on iPhones measured pinyin typing of short messages at a rate that works out to about 64 characters a minute. Both were small lab studies, and neither is a norm for anyone else.
Counting mistakes
A speed figure also depends on how the test counts errors. TQC's rules count a character left out as one error, and a result is not scored at all if the error rate reaches 10%.
Our own Chinese typing speed test did not count that way until September 2026. It compared the typed text with the passage position by position, so a typist who skipped the fourth character of a 75-character passage and typed everything else perfectly was shown 7% accuracy, 69 errors and 4 characters a minute. It also marked every correctly typed comma wrong, because the passages used English commas that no Chinese input method types, and it scored pinyin letters still being composed as wrong characters. It now lines the typed text up with the passage the way an edit-distance check does, so the same slip costs one error and the run reads 98% and 60 characters a minute.
Counting keys
The two valid conversions answer different questions. By keystrokes, a pinyin character costs about 3.6 to 3.8 keys once choosing it is counted, so 60 characters a minute is 43 to 46 words a minute in the five-keystroke sense. By meaning, we counted the official English and Chinese texts of the document our guide to what the same sentence costs in eleven languages also uses, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 1,710 English words against 2,555 Chinese characters, so one character carries about two-thirds of an English word, and 60 characters a minute is about 40 English words of the same content. That is one legal text, and a looser register may differ.
The same document gives the simplest comparison. Typed in English, the Declaration takes 10,587 keystrokes, counting spaces and punctuation. Spelled out in full pinyin, with one key to choose each word, the Chinese version takes about 9,500. Before any wrong guess by the input method, the two languages cost roughly the same number of keys.
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