HSK 1 Vocabulary: 150 Words or 500?

You went looking for the HSK 1 vocabulary list — a list, any list — and came back with two different answers. One page says HSK 1 is 150 words. Another says 500. Both are dated recently enough to look alive, and neither mentions the other. Before you memorize either list, know this: both numbers are correct, and the difference between them is the real story of the HSK right now. Usual disclosure: I build Piccard, a flashcard tool for language learners, and Mandarin is one of its supported directions — so I care less about which list you download than about what happens to you three weeks after you download it.

Two standards, one level number

The old HSK. The version most learners first encountered has six levels, and its Level 1 is famously small: 150 words. Numbers and greetings, the "survival Mandarin" tier. This is the list that circulates as pdfs, printed handouts, and half the apps.

The 2021 expansion. China's national language standard revised the framework — the thing the community informally calls "HSK 3.0" — and re-leveled everything. Its Band 1 is 500 words, and the full ladder now reaches more than double the old ceiling, roughly 11,000 words across nine levels. An "HSK 1 list" produced under this standard is not a lightly edited version of the old one; it is a different scope wearing the same number.

Side by side:

Which one applies to you depends on which edition your course, textbook, or prep material follows — a publishing date on the book is usually the tell. When a study partner insists HSK 1 is 150 words and a website insists it is 500, the productive answer is not "someone is wrong" but "which standard are you each following?"

The list was never the hard part

Whichever list you settle on, the list is solved the moment you find it. It is short, public, and free. Nobody fails HSK 1 because they couldn't *locate* the words.

The failure mode is downstream, and it arrives on a schedule. Week one is easy — numbers and greetings stick, and the deck feels great. Around week three the deck is 200 cards deep, the early cards have gone quiet in your memory, and isolated pairs of hanzi-with-pinyin start blurring into each other. That is not a character-learning failure; it is the absence of a review schedule. Memories decay fast enough that the decay has a name: the forgetting curve. The countermeasure, reviewing just before the drop with the gaps stretching each time, is spaced repetition, among the most consistently supported techniques in the field. A paper list has no schedule. Neither, honestly, does a pdf you re-read when you feel guilty.

The second failure mode is that a list has no sentences in it. HSK 1 words are easy to recognize in the list's font and hard to recognize in a sentence, and the exam is made of sentences.

Turning the list into something with a schedule

This is the part I built Piccard for, described as it ships, Mandarin direction specifically.

The list itself is the first material. Upload the word list or its pdf (a phone photo of a printed list works too) and candidate cards come back ranked 0–100 for how much each is worth learning. One confirm turns at most 20 into cards — the cap is a named constant in our code, since each card costs the model roughly 300–350 output tokens. The words you already know from classes or apps score toward the bottom and get skipped in one pass, which is the correct treatment of a 500-word list you partially know.

Then the material takes over. On captioned YouTube in Mandarin, click a subtitle line and candidate cards come back from that line — the clicked line only; a video without captions has nothing to tap and fails honestly. A double-click on any Chinese word on any web page opens the popup dictionary. Cards carry pinyin in the pronunciation field, and review runs FSRS-6 with zero configuration — 0.9 target retention, no settings page to get wrong. A card saved from a video replays the exact YouTube moment it came from. Uploading audio or video files for transcription is English-audio-only, so for Chinese listening material the caption route is the route, not file upload.

The rhythm that works at HSK 1 scale:

1. 5–10 new cards a day from the list, review queue emptied daily.
2. From roughly the second week, let more cards come from real captioned material than from the list.
3. At that pace the 150-word list is finished inside a month, the 500-word list inside a season — and by then the deck is no longer a list; it is your overlap with the language, scheduled by when you actually forget.

Which words deserve to become cards at all is a filter question with its own write-up: Which English Words Are Worth Learning? A Three-Part Filter — the framing transfers to Mandarin unchanged. And if you are mapping this whole approach onto Japanese instead, the starter-deck version of this conversation lives in Kaishi 1.5k: What the Default Japanese Starter Deck Is.

The short version

Both numbers are correct; the two lists are different scopes wearing the same name. Find out which standard your material follows — the publishing date is the tell — and treat either list as week-one material rather than the whole job: filter what you already know, meet the rest in sentences, and let the schedule run itself.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards — enough to finish the old HSK 1 exactly once), then prepaid top-ups at $5 / $10 / $20; no subscription, and topped-up energy never expires. To start: Piccard on the Chrome Web Store.

All guides: Piccard Blog.