A couple of weeks ago, a reader contacted us and asked for the vocabulary list for Rise of the Monkey King, so she could load it into one of her language learning apps. That seemed like a neat idea. So we’ve added a new link, “Download Vocabulary List,” to most of our fiction books on the home page. Find the book you want, click the link, and you’ll be able to download the complete vocabulary list as an Excel spreadsheet. This list is (or should be) identical to the glossary section in the back of the book, and contains each word used in the book, in Chinese characters, pinyin, and English.
We’ve done all of our fiction books that are written in Simplified Chinese characters, as well as the various compilations of the Journey to the West books. We don’t have the lists readily available for the books written in Traditional Chinese, so we’ll add those at a later date.
6 Comments
John August 18, 2023 - 08:18
Thank you very much! Just to mention that the vocabulary list link on your homepage for “The Last King of Shang, Book 1” when clicked downloads the JTW master vocabulary list instead.
admin August 18, 2023 - 09:06 – In reply to: John
Thanks for pointing this out, John! It’s been fixed, please try again. -jeff
Carlos January 29, 2025 - 13:33
I cannot find them, how can I get these excel files for the books?
Jeff Pepper January 29, 2025 - 14:07 – In reply to: Carlos
Hi Carlos. You can find the vocabulary lists for most of our books on HackChinese. Here’s the page for the Journey to the West books:
https://www.hackchinese.com/readers/imagin8-press/reader_levels/6
Allison Carrigan January 27, 2026 - 08:36 – In reply to: Jeff Pepper
Any chance you plan to re-post the links to download these on your website? I am interested, but you need to have a paid account to access the ones available through Hack Chinese. I would also be interested in knowing how many characters are in each of the books in total (not unique characters, just total count of characters for the whole book) so I can get an idea of how much volume I am reading.
Jeff Pepper April 27, 2026 - 12:47 – In reply to: Allison Carrigan
Hi Allison. Yes, the new version of HackChinese has put the word lists behind a paywall, unfortunately. We plan to add the word lists back to our website, that’s a big project but it’s “on the list”. At the same time we will likely add other info for each book, such as # of unique characters, and total length in words for Chinese and English. We’ll see what we can do!