HSK 3 Vocabulary: 300 New Words or 600?

You went looking for the HSK 3 vocabulary list and the pages give you two numbers. One hands over a 300-word pdf. Another says HSK 3 is 600 words. Both are correct, and the difference is not editorial sloppiness — it is the specific way this level's count question is different from the ones below it: at level 3 the question is cumulative, and most list-seekers don't notice until the reading section hands them a word from level 1 they skipped. Disclosure as always: I build Piccard, a flashcard tool, and Mandarin is one of its directions. My stake is not in which list you download — it is in whether the words are still with you on sitting day.

Three counts, one level number

The old HSK. The six-level version the exams have actually been running is explicit about level 3: 300 new words, 600 cumulative. Levels 1 and 2 introduced 150 each, so the arithmetic behind that 600 is 150 plus 150 plus 300. The ladder continues to 1,200 at level 4 and tops out at roughly 5,000.

The 2021 expansion. The national standard revision the community informally calls "HSK 3.0" re-leveled everything. Its Band 3 covers 2,245 words cumulative, 973 of them introduced at the band, and the ladder now runs to about 11,000 words across nine levels. That standard also put a new weight on handwritten characters and translation, neither of which the old exam asked for below level 3.

The 2025 revision. A revision of that standard, effective November 2025, lowered the beginner and intermediate requirements: its Band 3 is 1,000 words cumulative, 500 introduced. It also made the speaking test mandatory from level 3 onward. Per Wikipedia's account, as of July 2026 the full rollout of the new-standard exams has yet to be implemented, and a global trial ran in January 2026. Unless your prep material is brand new, the 600-word scope is the one it targets.

That last column is the one nobody prints on the cover of a word list, and it is the reason the next section exists.

The count is cumulative, the pdf is not

The list you download labeled "HSK 3" is almost always the new-at-this-level layer: 300 words under the old standard. The list is not wrong. It is a delta. It quietly assumes the 300 words from levels 1 and 2 are already in you, and the exam makes no such arrangement — it samples the whole 600, because a sentence cannot be told which level its words entered at. A learner who memorizes the 300-word pdf and walks in is carrying half the scope, and the missing half is the easier half, which makes the failure harder to diagnose afterward.

Under the 2021 standard the trap is steeper, not gentler. A Band 3 list of 973 words assumes 1,272 words behind it. The number to plan your calendar around is the cumulative one: 600 under the old standard, 2,245 under the 2021 band, 1,000 after the 2025 revision. The number printed on the pdf is just the intake for this leg.

This stacking is true at every level, but level 3 is where it first bites, because it is the first level where the base is big enough to have holes in it. The version of this confusion at the bottom of the ladder — one level, two lists, no stacking involved yet — is covered in HSK 1 Vocabulary: 150 Words or 500?.

What 600 words gets tested on

Level 3 is also where the exam format changes shape. Levels 1 and 2 are listening and reading only; level 3 adds a writing section. The full paper is 80 questions in about 90 minutes: 40 listening, 30 reading, 10 writing, with 180 of 300 points needed to pass.

The listening is not the level-2 format with more words. Each recording plays twice, and the later parts are dialogues that run four or five sentences before the question comes (section detail) — long enough that a word you only recognize in isolation has time to dissolve before you need it. The reading mixes sentence matching, fill-in-the-blank, and ten short passages each with a question. The writing part is where passive vocabulary stops being enough: five items have you rearrange given words into a sentence, and five have you supply the characters a sentence is missing. Producing, not pointing.

And the format is moving further in that direction, not back: the 2025 revision makes an oral component mandatory from this level onward. Whichever standard your sitting follows, level 3 is designed as the level where recognition alone stops passing the paper.

A 600-word schedule

Six hundred words defeats unscheduled study on a timetable you can predict: the first two hundred fade while you are memorizing the third. The fade was measured a century ago and named the forgetting curve; the countermeasure, showing each word just before it drops with the gap stretching every time you survive, is spaced repetition. In Piccard that scheduler is FSRS-6 running at a 0.9 target retention with no settings page to get wrong. At 150 words, willpower covered for the absence of a schedule. At 600 it will not, and at the next rung it gets worse — HSK 4 Vocabulary: 600 New Words or 1,000? covers a level whose new intake alone equals everything below it.

The rhythm at this scale:

1. 10 to 15 new cards a day, review queue emptied daily. At 10 a day, 600 words is 60 days of intake; at 15, it is 40.
2. Upload the word list — a pdf works, or paste the text straight in — and the candidates come back tagged high, medium, or low for how much each word is worth your time. The words you already carry from levels 1 and 2 land in the low tag and get skipped in one pass, which is the correct treatment of a cumulative scope you half-own. One confirm turns at most 20 into cards; the cap tracks what a confirm costs the model to write.
3. Two weeks before the sitting, stop adding cards and walk the cumulative list once as a coverage audit: anything you cannot produce on demand is your final drill.

Captions are where the sentences come from

The list has no sentences and the paper is nothing else. The cheapest source of level-3-appropriate sentences in context is captioned video. On a Mandarin YouTube video with captions, click one subtitle line and the card candidates come back from that line only — the clicked line, not a grab bag. A card saved this way carries the word with its pinyin in the pronunciation field, the gloss, the sentence it came from, and the timestamp; when the card comes due, review replays the exact moment in the video. A video without captions has nothing to click and the extension says so instead of improvising.

Two notes, stated plainly. File-based transcription runs in the language you are learning — Mandarin here — so Chinese listening reaches your deck through uploaded recordings too, not just the caption route. And no version of the tool drills handwriting — at this exact level that matters, because the writing section asks you to produce characters yourself. The scheduler keeps the 600 words alive; the pen practice for those ten writing items is a separate job you add on your own.

The short version

Three counts wear the number 3, and the one that builds your calendar is cumulative: 600 words in total under the old standard the live exam runs, of which 300 are new; 2,245 cumulative under the 2021 band; 1,000 after the 2025 revision. Check which standard your material follows, take the cumulative number as the job, and put a schedule under it: triage out what the lower levels already left in you, meet the rest in sentences from real captioned material, and run the review dates backward from your sitting.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards, a quarter of the old HSK 3's 600-word scope), 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.