HSK 4 Vocabulary: 600 New Words or 1,000?

Levels 1 through 3 of the HSK asked you, between them, for as many words as level 4 asks for on its own. This is the level where the work in front of you equals the work behind you, and the counts you find online disagree about how big it is. 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 those words are still with you six weeks later.

Three scopes, one level number

The old HSK. The six-level version most learners first met is explicit about level 4: 1,200 words cumulative, of which 600 are new at this level. Do the arithmetic once: 1,200 minus the 600 you carried up from level 3 (levels 1, 2, and 3 introduced 150, 150, and 300). Level 4 alone is as much new vocabulary as your entire studied past. The full ladder runs to roughly 5,000 words.

The 2021 expansion. The national standard revision the community informally calls "HSK 3.0" re-leveled everything. Its Band 4 covers 3,245 words cumulative, 1,000 of them introduced at the band, and the ladder now tops out around 11,000 words across nine levels. A 2025 revision of that same standard lowered the beginner and intermediate requirements: its Band 4 is 2,000 words cumulative, 1,000 introduced.

Which one is the real exam? As of July 2026, per Wikipedia's account, the full rollout of the new-standard exams has yet to be implemented, and levels 1 through 6 ran on the old syllabus for the entire life of the 2021 standard on paper. Unless your prep material is brand new, the 1,200-word scope is the one it targets: the publishing date of the book is usually the tell.

What the list is good for, and what it is not

Good: a published scope. The old HSK put its word lists out in public, which not every proficiency exam does. A knowable scope gives you a finish line and lets you plan backward from a sitting date. Two weeks out, the list becomes a coverage audit: walk it once, pull out the words you cannot produce on demand, and that residue is your final drill.

Bad: it is frequency-blind. "Level 4" records which exam bucket a word sits in, not how often you will meet it. Any 600-word block mixes words you have already brushed past in songs, group chats, and dramas with words whose only appearance in your life will be exam day. The list cannot tell those apart. You can.

Bad: it has no sentences. A word you recognize in the list's font can still be a stranger inside a clause, and the paper is clauses end to end.

Frequency and the list, in that order

Two orderings of the same words. List order tells you what the exam can ask; frequency order tells you what each card will pay back. The productive play is to let the list define the scope and let frequency, plus your own exposure, do the triage inside it. A word you have met in a drama is half-learned already: the card is cheap and the payoff is immediate. A word you have never met and will never meet again still earns a card, by exam decree rather than usefulness. Which words deserve cards at all has its own write-up: Which English Words Are Worth Learning? A Three-Part Filter. The framing transfers to Mandarin unchanged.

Cards with the schedule attached

Here is what Piccard does with that list on the Mandarin side, feature by feature.

The list is the first material. Upload it, its pdf, or a phone photo of the printed page, and candidates come back sorted by how much each word is worth your time — high, medium, low, with the highs pre-ticked. One confirm turns at most 20 into cards; the cap tracks what a confirm costs the model to write (a few hundred generated tokens per card) and nothing else. The words you can already produce land in the low tag, so a first pass skips them instead of re-teaching them — the difference between starting this project and drowning in it.

Then the material takes over. On captioned Mandarin YouTube, click a subtitle line and the candidates for that step come from that one line; a video with no captions has nothing to tap and tells you so. A double-click on any Chinese word on any web page opens the popup dictionary. Pinyin sits in the pronunciation field, review runs FSRS-6 at a 0.9 target retention with no settings page to get wrong, and a card taken from a video replays the exact YouTube moment it came from. One boundary worth knowing: uploading audio or video files for transcription is English-audio-only, so for Chinese listening the caption route is the route.

Scripts, stated plainly. HSK is set in simplified characters, and the Chinese direction matches: cards come back in simplified by default, with a Traditional option in the same picker for those who read both. Pinyin and meaning are script-independent, and listening does not care about glyphs at all. What no version of the tool does is handwriting — drilling character forms by hand for the exam stays a separate job.

The rhythm at level-4 scale:

1. 10 to 15 new cards a day from the ranked list, review queue emptied daily. At 10 a day, 600 new words is 60 days of intake; at 15, it is 40.
2. After the first few hundred are in, real captioned material should be supplying more new cards than the list does.
3. Two weeks before the sitting, stop adding cards. Walk the list once as the coverage audit above, and let the review queue do the rest.

The schedule is not a productivity nicety; it is the whole mechanism. Unreviewed vocabulary decays on a curve that was measured over a century ago, the forgetting curve, and the countermeasure, spaced repetition, shows you each word just before it drops, with the gaps stretching every time you survive. At 150 words, willpower papered over the absence of a schedule. At 600, it will not.

The two-standards story from the bottom of the ladder starts at HSK 1 Vocabulary: 150 Words or 500?. The opposite failure mode, an exam that publishes no list at all, is JLPT N5 Vocabulary: The List That Isn't Official.

The short version

All three scopes are real and they wear the same number: 600 new words under the old ladder the exams have actually been running, 1,000 under the 2021 standard's Band 4, 2,000 cumulative after the 2025 revision. Check which standard your material follows, treat the list as the definition of the job rather than the job itself, and put a schedule under it: triage out what you know, meet the rest in sentences, and run the review dates backward from your sitting.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards, a quarter of the old HSK 4's 600 new words), 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.