Taking the HSK? Already taken it? Report in here!

[Diodatix]

- Age: 21

- Bachelors degree in civil engineering

- Self taught to fluency in Italian

- Strong recommendation from my CI.

 

What do you reckon my chances are of getting the Confucius Institute scholarship?

Should I focus more on my strong academic skills or my appreciation of Chinese culture in my application? I really want to study in China!

[mungouk]

On 5/10/2018 at 8:16 AM, lakesandrivers said:

Do you folks register through chinestest.cn or through the Uni?

 

You can do either.

 

I found a test centre in Shanghai using chinesetest.cn, but when I contacted the centre directly to check dates they sent me a registration form and instructions on paying with PayPal.

I did a test here in Singapore last year and registered directly with them as well.

 

 

 

[xinhuar]

Just got my scores for the HSK6, not too bad for my first time ever taking an HSK Still lots of room for improvement though

 

听力: 79

阅读: 80

写作: 75

总分: 234.0

 

[Paradox]

Just got my HSK 4 results from test two weeks ago and passed!!

 

Woo. Amazed at my listening mark as I was really rubbish and guessed a lot. Actually did better than the practice/mock ones for most of these.

 

HSK四级 (14-Jul-2018)汉语水平考试
听力	阅读	写作	Total Score	Status
84	88	78	250	合格

 

Still my actual level is still really really bad and does make me think that HSK 5 is probably the level you need to get to before it becomes useful. 

 

And when I mean get to, I don't mean hear/read a couple of key words and determine the answer from the mutiple choice options (which is what I currently do) but roughly understand what was said/written.

 

I still couldn't hold a conversation but at least I'm improving! 

[mungouk]

Great @Paradox well done!  

 

Thanks for the tip-off too, I just managed to see mine for HSK 3 from the same date:

 

HSK三级 (Jul 14, 2018)汉语水平考试
听力	阅读	写作	Total Score	Status
88	74	92	254	合格

 

I'm quite surprised my score is so high given how it felt on the day, although it's understandable that the reading score is much lower than the others, as I mentioned in another post the difficulty I had reading the Hanzi on the screen in a low quality font (no anti-aliasing; screen not very high resolution).

 

So now the long, slow crawl up the lower foothills of HSK 4 can begin I guess... how long do you guys reckon it takes to get from 3 to 4?  Looks like quite a jump.  I would imagine perhaps 9-12 months, having lessons 2-3 times a week and learning vocab more or less every day?

[hejmeddig]

Just got my scores from the July 14th HSK. Did a retake this time since I'll be studying abroad at Tsinghua University in the fall.

 

Made some major improvements from my results 1.5 years ago, especially on reading and writing. But jeez louise did I really bomb the listening! Fairly disappointed on that part, even dropped 12 points from 1.5 years ago. I think I can put some of the blame on the fact that the test center address listed was different from the office of the test center and I went to the office not realizing it was different. It was about 5 minutes from the test center and I was notified by someone arriving to work at 8:58 to go to another building with the test starting at 9:00. Had to run over and I think being so flustered really affected my performance on the listening sections, especially considering 1.5-year-ago-me with much worse vocabulary scored much better on listening than this time-me. I was getting around mid-80s on the practices tests I was taking.

 

I think I will end up taking the test again at some point down the road just for personal reasons since I know I can do better on listening and I actually haven't finished all my HSK preparations, just took this for my Tsinghua study abroad next semester. If anyone here is around Beijing next semester, feel free to reach out to me, it's a lovely community here.

[Lê Trung Hiếu]

Dear all,

I took the HSK 6 exam last year and got 273/300 

Hope to get acquainted with new friends around the world 

[mungouk]

Great score @Lê Trung Hiếu! Welcome to the forums.  HSK 6 is a great achievement.

I'm guessing you're in (or from) Vietnam... where are you now and why do you want to learn Chinese?

 

All the best.

 

 

 

 

[mungouk]

HSKK and paper-based HSK results from 14 July should also be out today btw.

 

I just checked on http://www.chinesetest.cn/ and passed my HSKK beginner level.  Not particularly ambitious but I figured it's worth starting lower to get used to the exam format.

 

Best of luck to everyone getting their results today! 

[Lê Trung Hiếu]

@mungoukI have lived and worked in China for almost 10 years, I took the test because I came back to Vietnam and need to find a job here. You are good at studying foreign language, how can you study German language? I want to but it seems too difficult, especially for Southeast Asian

[mungouk]

4 hours ago, Lê Trung Hiếu said:

how can you study German language?

 

Well, I used to have a German girlfriend so I had good motivation back then... ?
 

For a native English speaker there are many features of German that make it relatively easy to learn (due to the Germanic roots of English). On the other hand the grammar takes a lot of studying, memorising many tables of declensions and cases etc.  One thing I don't miss in Mandarin at all!

 

 

[yaycat]

@mungouk I just took HSK 4 (2018/9/16) and I took HSK 3 two years earlier (2016/06). The jump is definitely easier if you have a tutor/class, or something else structured to help you along the way (or at least that is my opinion, but it also depends on your drive/personality/learning style). Kind of makes me sad/embarrassed that I took so long to get to the point of feeling comfortable taking the HSK 4, but language learning is a process and I try not to forget that. (Granted I also didn't start seriously studying for HSK 4 until January 2018..)

Anyways, I would say your 9-12 months guess sounds about right.

 

[mungouk]

@yaycat Did you take the paper test or on a computer?  There seem to be various different formats for the computer one.

 

Good luck with your result!

[laomao]

On 7/29/2018 at 5:54 PM, mungouk said:

So now the long, slow crawl up the lower foothills of HSK 4 can begin I guess... how long do you guys reckon it takes to get from 3 to 4?  Looks like quite a jump.  I would imagine perhaps 9-12 months, having lessons 2-3 times a week and learning vocab more or less every day?

I took five months between HSK3 and HSK4, with classes twice a week and learning words daily but also working full time. I'm now managing the gap between 4 and 5, with less time to study... 

[mungouk]

4 hours ago, laomao said:

I took five months between HSK3 and HSK4

 

Thanks @laomao.  I'm up to Chapter 4 in the HSK 4上 book now and, the speed I'm going with my teacher I should have finished that by end of October, so 3 months approximately. So assuming the second book 4下 is the same then it will have taken me 6 months. I'll take a month after that to revise and do practice tests I think, especially the reading.

 

So I might look at March 2019 for the next test, although I'm not sure yet where I will be.

 

 

[yaycat]

@mungouk What kind of differences are you referring to with various computer tests

Alsooooo, the scores are in..

 

[mungouk]

6 minutes ago, yaycat said:

What kind of differences are you referring to with various computer tests

 

From what people are reporting here, it seems that the software isn't exactly the same in all test centres.  See here for more.

 

Great score btw, especially for the reading section!  I'm still way too slow on that.

[yaycat]

@mungouk Ah, okay. My HSK 4 test experience seemed pretty similar, if not identical, to what Paradox explained in the forum link you provided. I don't know why the input system for the writing section was such a pain, it was like it would recognize some words but not others? I tried typing 'shouji' to get 手机 to show up, but either no matches came up or they were not the ones I was looking for. So for some compound words I had to type them character by character or use another word that the character is found in. That ate up some of my time - not sure how much, but I was already anticipating a not-so-great writing score anyway based on my practice tests  
 

Don't worry about reading slow, it takes time to improve reading speed! With the first practice HSK 4 I took, I did not have time to read through everything and had to make random guesses towards the end. Eventually I was able to read through everything in the HSK 4 reading section with extra time at the end, no problem. However, I may have to utilize more test-taking strategies for getting through the HSK 5 reading section in a timely manner as it is a lot more text. It almost feels like starting over again which is a little disheartening, but also kind of cool when I think about it through the lens of 'look how much room there is for me to improve'  

[CherrylS]

I just got my test score results for the HSK 5. I'm really happy with the score since I studied using the 10 practice exams from BCUP mock exams. (I got about 70-80% for reading and listening on average)

I didn't practice the writing section (mainly because I wasn't sure on how to prepare for it), I've been studying for 2 years by myself.

 

To practice the reading section I read random web-novels and 知乎 articles putting sentences into anki for any words I didn't know.

For the listening section I listened to a lot of dramas and variety shows.

 

 

This is my score.

 

The listening section wasn't hard and the long passage readings were a lot easier than the mock exam. The only thing is that you can't move forward and see the next question if you've answered in advance. A nice thing is that you can click the answer in advance before they announce it. So it could be useful to click what you think the answer might be and then confirm when you hear what the question is.

For the long passage readings if there is more than one question they all display on the same tab, so you get to see the questions together.

 

I found the reading section a bit harder than the practice test, maybe it was because I wasn't used to the font they were using. About 20 questions in I realized you could use the cursor to highlight sections of the text. I finished with 12 minutes to spare and used that time to re-read questions I wasn't sure about.

 

For the writing section the word scrambles, they didn't have a click and drop setting, you had to type everything with the HSK test input method in a blank box. Their input method was a bit cumbersome, you couldn't type in full sentences, it would not allow you to type more than two characters at a time. For one sentence I had to type 卧室, but it wouldn't show up  in the suggestions so I just typed 卧式 and then 教室 and removed the characters not needed. You cannot use the copy and paste function for the word scramble section, I'm not sure about the writing part.

 

I finished the writing section early and I thought that you had to wait for the time to run out, but then with 5 minutes left I saw at the right top corner a button in English saying end test.

I think that the time should be used to revise sentences though, because it is very easy to do mistakes using the IME.

 

Hope this helps anyone thinking of doing the online test in the future.

 

[LinZhenPu]

Wow, you did very well to pass the HSK5 with just 2 years of self-study.