HSK 6/Listening Comprehension

[MPhillips]

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[bande]

Sounds Interesting! Do you remember the title or the number?

[MPhillips]

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[xuefang]

I can only comment that the HSK6 listening isn't that hard that native speakers couldn't understand it. I don't remember anything exact from the test, as I passed it in May 2013, but I got 82/100. I think the listening was the easiest part in the whole test.

 

I'm interested to hear why they would say that it's so hard.

[MPhillips]

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[MPhillips]

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[洋人丹]

Yeah it's not that hard...

 

I got 98/100 on the listening part of HSK 6. The only thing is that sometimes it's an interview, and the answer to a question is something just mentioned off-hand in a single sentence and not addressed again in the interview. If you weren't prepared or zone out for a few seconds you might miss it. 

 

The thing is the way the questions are set up, it's easy to mark the answers as you go in the listening portion, so you don't have to just remember all the information discussed inside.

[tysond]

Haven't done the HSK 6 itself (I am around 4+) it but it wasn't that hard to follow the listening examples in the video.  They are not "gibberish".  

The first one the Chinese hosts are trying to follow all the convoluted relationships but it doesn't really matter as the answer is basically equivalent to the joke from the movie Spaceballs:

 

Dark Helmet: I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.

Lone Starr: What's that make us?

Dark Helmet: Absolutely nothing! Which is what you are about to become.

 

All the wrong answers give relatively close relationships, and although admittedly I have never head 八竿子打不上 I guess it's similar to the idea of "wouldn't touch it with a 6 foot pole" in English

 

The next one was bit of a joke as well, I had a visit to the dentist recently I know the key vocabulary needed.  Even if you didn't know the answer is plainly stated in the dialog itself, you just have to not be confused by them using the same word in a different context.

 

So they are sort of trick questions.  You do need to be able to listen well enough to extract meaning while listening, and even adjust your understanding of previous information given new listening, or you'll get lost.

 

 

The next one was reading (something about raising and attacking chickens, need to know your characters well for this), then a grammar question, as usual native speakers find grammar hard to analyze.  In the discussion they point out that some dialects use the wrong order anyway so it's a common enough mistake.

 

Then we have the 意思 discussion which was interesting. I've had someone ask me to translate 不好意思 into English for them before so I was aware of some of the different meanings here.  Again this is testing your understanding of 意思 used in different contexts.  Not sure if it's meant to be a written question or what, at this point they seem to be testing the guest by throwing hard stuff at her.

 

(Actually I downloaded a sample HSK6 audio to check if there's any difference and the first question sounds like yet another joke - the old "I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you!").

[MPhillips]

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[imron]

It's a joke.  See also here and here.  People just slap HSK Level 6 on things like this as part of the joke.

[MPhillips]

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[imron]

Here's another one in a similar vein:

 

 

I sure it's not any more part of the admissions test for elementary school in HK than those other questions are part of HSK 6.

[mokushiroku]

Level 6 is easy compared to the old HSK test.

 

However, we still have many customers who hire tutors just to practice listening. Listening seems to be a major sticking point for moving from intermediate to advanced.

 

My advice is consistently to change your attitude:

 

-Listen to Chinese consistency

-Don't read TOO MUCH into every word and phrase

-Don't feel intimidated when you miss a word or phrase; NOBODY is a perfect listener, even native speakers

[dane_chengdu]

I've been looking at some old tests and I find that they reuse a lot of the questions. It is quite common that the first 15 listening questions will have 3-5 questions that were also part of the test the previous month. For that reason, I was wondering if there's any way to find the exams from May, June, and July 2014.

 

I think the listening is the easiest part of the exam, but I'm having a hard time with the writing so I'm hoping to get 75+ for reading so that I can pass even if I screw up on the writing part.

[wushucrab20]

I think with practice doing some listening comprehension drills it should be totally fine. I took a listening comprehension class at Tsinghua University for a semester and then bought an HSK prep book and practiced a few times with the questions in the listening section, which were similar to the things we practiced and tested in class.  I took the HSK level 6 this march and scored 100 on it.