HSK 2 Vocabulary: 150 New Words or 300?

The count, first. HSK 2 — the second rung of China's standardized Chinese proficiency exam — asks for 150 new words on top of HSK 1's 150, so 300 cumulative, under the six-level standard the live exam still runs. The paper is listening and reading only: 60 questions, about 55 minutes, and 120 of 200 points to pass. Plan your calendar around the cumulative 300, not the 150 printed on the pdf — and because level 2 is the last level with no writing section, it is the cheapest rung on which to put a real review schedule in place before level 3 makes production part of the test. The three-standard mess hiding behind this one number is what the rest of this guide untangles. Disclosure as always: I build Piccard, a flashcard tool, and Mandarin is one of its directions.

One level number, three different jobs

The old HSK. Under the six-level HSK that real sittings still use, level 2 means 150 new words standing on level 1's 150 — 300 cumulative. The climb ahead: 600 at level 3, roughly 5,000 at the summit.

The 2021 expansion. The national standard overhaul that learners nickname "HSK 3.0" stretched the ladder to nine bands and about 11,000 words. Its second band stops at 1,272 words — 772 of them introduced at that step, on a base of 500.

The 2025 revision. That standard got revised again, with effect from November 2025, and the beginner side got trimmed: bands 1 and 2 together now carry 500 words. Wikipedia's account, as of July 2026: the new-standard exams have not fully rolled out — a global trial ran in January 2026. A book printed before 2021 counts the old way, and so does the live paper.

The disagreement is widest exactly here

Level 1's versions at least agree in spirit: 150 old, 500 new — both "the beginner batch." At level 2, though, the ladders split hard. Three hundred against 1,272 is a gap of more than four times, at the exact level where a beginner has no way to tell which standard their textbook quietly follows. The practical reading of that spread: check the copyright page of your material before you check anything else. Anything published before 2021 is running the old counts, and the live exam still is too.

The count question one rung down — where the same name covers 150 words or 500 — is covered in HSK 1 Vocabulary: 150 Words or 500?.

What the level-2 paper actually asks

The format is 60 questions in about 55 minutes: 35 listening across four parts, then 25 reading across four. The full score is 200 points and 120 clears the pass line. There is no writing section — that arrives at level 3, and with it the first items you have to write by hand.

That format is why level 2 vocabulary work is pure recognition-and-sound: you need to hear a word in a short dialogue and pick the matching picture or sentence, and to read a sentence with a blank and know which of four words fills it. Neither half asks you to produce a character by hand. The study consequence is simple — level 2 rewards listening to and reading the words in context, on a schedule, and punishes nothing else.

The last level you can wing — so don't

Three hundred words is still small enough that unscheduled study limps over the line, and that is precisely the trap. Level 3 doubles the cumulative scope to 600 and adds the writing section; the learners who arrive there with a working review habit absorb that, and the ones who arrive having "just memorized" two pdfs start over. Level 2 is where the habit is cheap. The mechanism is spaced repetition — each card returning at the edge of the forgetting curve, intervals lengthening with every clear — and in Piccard that schedule is FSRS-6 at a fixed 0.9 target retention, nothing configurable.

A schedule that fits the size:

1. Fifteen new cards a day puts the whole 300 in play in twenty days; ten a day stretches it to a month, with the cards that fall due cleared the same day.
2. Feed the list in — pdf or pasted text — and each word comes back graded high, medium, or low by how much studying it deserves. Level-1 words you never forgot sort into low and go in one pass; a single confirm caps the batch at 20 new cards.
3. From two weeks out, add nothing new. Walk all 300 as a checklist instead — every word you cannot recognize on sight becomes the final drill.

Meeting the 300 in sentences

A word list is words; the level-2 paper is dialogues and short passages. Captioned video is where the 300 cost the least to meet in sentence form. With the extension active on a captioned Mandarin YouTube video, one click on a subtitle line produces candidate cards drawn from exactly that line; saving one keeps five things — the word, the gloss, the pinyin (filed under pronunciation), the sentence, and the second of the video it came from — and at review time the card plays that second back. A video without captions gives the click nothing to land on, and the extension tells you so rather than inventing candidates.

Two boundaries worth writing down. Uploaded files transcribe in the target language — for this guide, Mandarin — so listening material can arrive as recordings you upload, not only as captioned video. And the tool has no handwriting mode anywhere, which at this level costs nothing: there is no writing section to serve. The exemption ends one rung up, where HSK 3 Vocabulary: 300 New Words or 600? takes the story — and the rung after that is HSK 4 Vocabulary: 600 New Words or 1,000?.

The short version

The number that matters is the old standard's cumulative 300 — 150 of it new — because that is the scope the live paper samples. The 2021 band would claim 1,272 and the 2025 revision merges the first two bands into 500, but neither is the exam in front of you. Take 300 as the job, skim off whatever level 1 already deposited, gather what remains from captioned video, and use the writing-free format as the window in which the review habit gets built.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards, half of the old HSK 2's 300-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.