HSK 5 reading

Required proof of Chinese for admission, graduation and scholarships in China. Scores are valid for two years.

Official exam page

This exam is mid-change

HSK is mid-reform and the reform is unresolved. The nine-level GF0025-2021 standard governs, and HSK 7–9 is live: 98 questions across five skills including translation, about 210 minutes, internet-based only. But HSK 1–6 as sold and sat today is still the legacy six-level format — the per-level pages describe it and it is what you will sit. A 3.0 syllabus, competency profile and sample papers for levels 1–6 are published, and the awarding body has announced a SECOND round of global trial ("试行") testing, the first sitting having been 31 January 2026. No cutover date for levels 1–6 has been announced. Anyone telling you HSK "has moved to 3.0", or that it "has not been reformed", is wrong in one direction or the other.

This page is deliberately thinner on numbers than the others, and the reason is worth stating plainly: HSK 5’s official structure was not retrieved from the awarding body during research, so no reading item count, duration or item-type breakdown is stated here at all.

The reading section

Reading time
not published
Scored reading items
not published
Texts or passages
not published
Approximate words
not published
CEFR level
no official CEFR mapping
Published annual volume
not published — no annual figure exists from the awarding body
Awarding body
CTI Co., Ltd. (汉考国际 / Chinese Testing International), with the Center for Language Education and Cooperation (CLEC), MOE

What that means in practice

This level was not fetched from the awarding body during research, so no reading item count, duration or item-type breakdown is stated. Like levels 1–6 generally, the exam sold and sat today is the legacy six-level format: Listening, Reading and (from level 3) Writing, with reading as one of three reported scores in a 300-point total. Pull chinesetest.cn before publishing figures for this level.

Every figure on this page was checked against the awarding body on that date. Exam formats change; check the official page before you book.

How well reading practice fits this exam

A full reading section

Reading is a complete, separately scored section with real passages. Training it moves a number that appears on your result.

LingoRead trains reading. It does not prepare a speaking or writing paper, it does not mark free-text answers, and it does not issue or predict an official result.

Practise reading for this exam

Start with this exam already selected. You get a passage at your level every day, with audio, tap-to-translate and comprehension questions.

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Why an empty field is better than a filled one

It would be trivial to copy an item count from another site, and you would have no way to tell we had done it. On an exam you pay to sit and that is mid-reform, a confident wrong number is worse than an admitted gap: it makes you plan a pace for a paper that may not have that shape. So the fields we could not verify say "not published" and link to the awarding body instead.

What we can say for this level is what holds across levels 1–6 generally: the exam sold and sat today is the legacy six-level format, with Listening, Reading and Writing, and reading as one of three reported scores in the points total. For anything more specific, pull the official level page before you plan.

What HSK 5 asks of a reader

At this level the gap for most learners is no longer character recognition in isolation but reading speed across connected text: knowing a character and reading a sentence containing it at pace are different abilities, and only the second one is tested. Vocabulary lists build the first and leave the second untouched.

LingoRead writes a Chinese passage at your level every day, reads it aloud, translates any character or word you tap and asks comprehension questions on it. That is speed-in-context training, which is useful under the current format and under whatever replaces it.

Honest scope

We train reading. We do not prepare listening or writing, we do not simulate HSK formats, and on this level in particular we are not the source for the paper’s structure — the awarding body is, and this page links to it.

Questions people ask

Free tools that help

Our four free tools are English-only for now, so there is no matching tool for this exam. They are still worth a look if you also read in English.

See the free tools

Other levels of HSK

No dedicated page — the research did not show enough search demand for it.

HSK 5 reading: an honest page about what we could not verify | LingoRead