a couple of months ago i thought that since i was leaving china soon and had been studying chinese for 1 year and a half, i might as well have some sort of certification. so, at my teachers advice, i registered for the hsk (the standard chinese test for non-native speakers, also called the chinese toefl), but on the basic level, because i hadn’t done any specific preparation for this test. to take the test on the basic level you have to know around 800 characters/1033 words.
so last month, i did the test along with a lot of other hopeful students. it’s a multiple choice test from beginning to end, and it has 3 parts: listening, grammar and reading comprehension. the first 2 parts are ok, but the texts they put on the reading comprehension part are really hard, some of them i was completely clueless… i honestly can’t understand the difficulty gap between the three parts. why would they make a reasonably easy test and then make the last part 100 times harder? :|
anyway, a month later, ladies and gentlemen, i am very proud to announce that i’ve passed the HSK exam! :D i was given a level 2 grade, which translates in
“The candidate has acquired the basic (middle) Chinese competence that can meet the demand of basic daily life, a certain range of social communication and study to some degree. “
yay! i’m really happy about this, and it’s a big motivation for me to keep learning chinese elsewhere. perhaps in a couple of years i’ll be ready for the intermediate exam. :)
11 replies on “hsk”
Parabéns :)
Uau! Parabéns!
They think that Reading (阅读) should test your ability to understand a text even if you don’t know most of the words in there. I admit that I don’t think this makes a lot of sense too lol, but my subjects here at university are also divided as the HSK parts, and I have this kind of ‘train’ of deduce important points of a very complex text above my level. So, in fact, is not that this part is harder than the other parts, is just that you are not supposed to understand the all text – but, actually, they allways ask really detailed information about the text and it is really annoying, how are we suppose to know the details if we are suppose to understand only the main meaning?? And you know what? Japanese and korean people can understand a chinese text without previously studied the words, because they use chinese characters in their own languages!!! Reading is a really unfair part of us, westerners!!! :P
for us* :P
I’m so proud of you :D
you’re leaving china soon?!?! NOOO!!! i just discovered your amazing blog!! don’t leave yet!!!
Congratulations!! :D
Parabéns! :)
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