Chinese frequency list Black Myth: Wukong (BMWK)

The most-wishlisted game on Steam has now also become the most-played game on Steam. Less than two hours after launch, 1,249,525 people were playing Black Myth: Wukong, rocketing it into the hall of fame for all-time record Steam launches. It's already easily surpassed a list of powerhouse games including Hogwarts Legacy at 879,000, Elden Ring at 953,000, and Cyberpunk 2077 at 1.054 million, all according to SteamDB.

If you're like me, you probably don't care all too much about numbers like this and just can't wait to get into the first major game in a Chinese mythological setting. As a Chinese learner, you might want to do that in Chinese, though. But this is not only a tough game when it comes to its gameplay but also when it comes to its language. A new setting, loads of character names, and quite a bit of classical Chinese make it challenging.

How can this list help me?

A big game like Black Myth: Wukong will introduce you to a lot of new language. All those new words quickly become overwhelming. Unless you pause the gameflow every few seconds to look up words, you will lose track of what's going on fast. If you're on a replay after having played through the game in English, that might be fine. But for most of us that is not the case. And even if you try to learn all the new words you encounter, you might have hundreds of words to learn before you can start playing.

But what if you didn't have to learn all that many words to understand what's going on? Enter frequency lists. Frequency lists are lists of words sorted by how often they appear in a text, movie, game, etc. By learning the most frequent words first, you can understand a lot more with a lot less effort. And this is what this frequency list is for.

What is in this list?

I've created this list from all the language in the game, such as dialogues, cutscenes, game controls, and item, character, and location descriptions. I've then included the HSK level of all official HSK words, translations, pinyin, and info whether each word is a character, monster, item, or place name. To keep the list's size in check, I've only included words that occurr at least twice (roughly 10,000).

How do I use this list?

Unless you just started out learning Chinese, you will know most of the words at the top of this list. If you don't, you should probably stay away fromt this game in Chinese for now ;)

To make it easier for you to filter out the words you don't know yet, I've included the HSK level of all official HSK words. Filter out the HSK levels you're confident with and pick out the words you don't know yet manually.

If you use a flashcard app like Anki, you can import this list and rely on Anki filtering out duplicates. There are a few limitations with that so make sure to double-check. You can also export the words from your flashcard app, import them here, and filter them out. Let me know at michael@mylingua.world if you need help with that!

Are there any limitations?

Of course, I did not have the time to count all the words in the game manually. So this list was created automatically. For that I had to first segment the text into words. In Chinese, that is quite tricky for machines to do, especially since the game contains quite a bit of classical Chinese. Some of this word recognition did most certainly go wrong.

But that shouldn't be a problem for you. The vast majority of times the machine got it right and the few wrongly split words should not be anywhere close to the top of the list. On top of that, I made sure that in-game names are recognized and not split up.

I've not taken repetitions into account. You might, for example, hear the same conversation snippet whenever you talk to a character in the game or read through an item description several times. I've only counted those once.

Translations of named things in the game, such as characters, items, and location names are based on the original in-game translations. The translations of normal words are based on CC-CEDICT, the basis of Pleco's dictionary, if available. The rest of translations (a small share of the total) were generated with Microsoft's Azure Translator and might be wrong.