Update, October 2026: Under the HSK 3.0 exam syllabus (November 2025), the near-doubling happens at the lower bands: Band 1 goes from 150 to 300 words, Band 3 from 600 to 1,000 and Band 4 from 1,200 to 2,000. At Band 6 the two standards are close, 5,000 against 5,400 words. The new exam also starts only with the December 13, 2026 sitting, so anyone testing before that still takes the old format. See HSK 3.0 starts December 13, 2026.
The numbers first: the HSK 3.0 standard defines roughly 11,000 words across its nine bands, with about 5,400 in bands 1–6 alone — while the entire old HSK 2.0 range topped out around 5,000. Someone targeting "HSK 4" today faces meaningfully more language than someone who took it a year ago. Copying each character ten times into a notebook was already slow; at this scale it simply does not work. Here is a three-layer system that does.