Some time between this morning and this afternoon, a bunch of characters I’d already learned (or were automatically skipped when I first signed up) have been marked “unlearned” somehow. Very frustrating. To illustrate, I’d already finished through HSK5. Now earlier stages are no longer complete:
Was there a reworking of which characters are in which stage? What happened to my progress?
Hi, as I understand it, this is the update to the HSK 3.0 curriculum (2026). I don’t think the characters’ progression has changed; rather, they’ve been reordered based on their current classification.
From what I’ve seen in my SRS, the progress and the number of characters remain exactly the same; only their classification in the HSK has changed, and more words have recently been added. I’m not sure if any new characters were added.
Previously, each level from 1 to 6 had exactly 300 characters, and levels 7–9 had 1,200; now they have varying numbers of characters.
As @Bassmd says, I’m in the process of updating the outdated HSK 3.0 to the new HSK 3.0 (for ease, we’ll just call it 3.1) one which was released back in Nov 2025.
I see that you were using the HSK skip over setting, and thus due to how HSK 3.1 shuffled things around, some of the previously considered hsk1-3 are now in hsk 4 or above 
I’m not sure what the ideal solution here is, but I also acknowledge it’s frustrating to suddenly get characters that were skipped over in the previous HSK 3.0 iteration.
I ran a script to check the overlap between the HSK versions:
| Level | Old total | New total | Character Overlap |
|---|---|---|---|
| HSK1 | 300 | 246 | 221 |
| HSK2 | 300 | 125 | 54 |
| HSK3 | 300 | 284 | 64 |
| HSK4 | 300 | 441 | 112 |
| HSK5 | 300 | 431 | 158 |
| HSK6 | 300 | 413 | 186 |
| HSK7-9 | 1200 | 1148 | 950 |
It seems HSK3 was ~75% reshuffled with new characters, same with HSK4+ and thus is why you’re seeing them now.
Let me know how you’d like to proceed from here! I’m not sure if there’s an easy (and universal, for others affected by this) migration path, unfortunately 
Yeah I also came to the forums to investigate the change.
First, let me say that I’m glad that Hanzi hero is keeping up with changes and continues to develop the site!
A couple of thoughts…it would be nice if the progress report on the dashboard tracked the study order, which I understand is still 3.0?
But if one is actively studying for exams, it would be nice to see (and presumably study the order of) 3.1. I might also note that the majority of the study materials on YouTube are for hsk 2.0. This suggests an ideal solution which would be each person could select the HSK version that they want to follow (for study and) on the dashboard.
But I don’t have any idea how hard that is. But I thought I’d mention it.
I’m not sure how many actually use this feature but, why not just run a script that skips the characters from the old HSK list if this feature was activated? (could be easily done via api as well )
I like the update to the new HSK but I think @welchn13 also had a good idea by being able to choose.
But yeah, probably way harder to implement.
Thanks for the context @phil. I’m wondering if it would be possible to retain the previous “skipped” status when changing to the new HSK categorization, rather than (what I assume was) re-applying the “skip HSK3 and below” rule, which doesn’t take into account what was actually skipped previously?
As it is right now, I’ve been trying to go through and (re)skip the characters I already know, but it’s pretty tedious and time-consuming, and definitely frustrating when I already have limited time for daily study and I’m trying to keep my forward momentum.
As someone else with limited time, a technique I found particularly useful is that the skip button directly on the lesson screen. You don’t have to pre-skip characters/words by trawling the big curriculum lists. Just do you’re lessons as normal, and if/when it shows you a character to learn that you already know, just skip it right then in the moment. It’ll just give you the next one in the list to look at. Instead of trying to spend an hour trawling the list, you just spent maybe 10 seconds each day skipping anything you don’t care about if it shows up.
In retrospect this should’ve been done from the start; anyone who enabled this setting would expect it to persist across HSK versions 
I’ve since ran a script which migrated all “skipped” statuses from the previous HSK3.0. Let me know if you still notice any discrepancies!
This script was applied to anyone who had this setting and an account before the HSK 3.1 update, thus no one else should run into this issue now. Thanks for reporting!
The study course now follows along the HSK3.1 as soon as we migrated it over.
While it would be cool to have multiple HSK versions, it would be a little more complex. Though being able to follow different “courses” is something we may want to look into, e.g. if you’re using a book.
It’d be nice to just find the resource and prioritize accordingly, but I’ll have to give it more thought 
A great feature (in the future) for that would be the ability to have study lists and select a specific list so that the lessons are prioritised in the order of that list, view progress, etc…
