Why do many students give up learning Chinese around the HSK4 level?

[becky82]

From personal communication with private school teachers, it seems many students give up learning Chinese around the HSK4 level.  Or, at least, they stop taking classes.  I'm kind of interested in why.

 

Why do many students give up learning Chinese around the HSK4 level?

 

I'm particularly interested in whether these students want to continue studying, but feel unable to continue studying (perhaps due to external commitments: budget, work, family, etc.), or have lost the motivation to study (maybe it's where they become aware of how endless the Chinese language is, or because the HSK4 Standard Course textbook is incredibly boring and they couldn't bear any more tedium, or maybe it's just "wow, that's a lot of words I'd need to learn").  Perhaps people think of HSK levels as "all or nothing", and thereby learning half the HSK5 material counts for nothing.

[vellocet]

By the time you're HSK4, you can hold conversations and are basically functional in China.  You'll still miss out on a lot, but you can do things like negotiate with a landlord, call a plumber to get a leaky pipe repaired, talk to people you meet, order from a menu, etc. 

 

Plus I've heard that HSK5 and 6 teach increasingly esoteric vocabulary that you'll never use.  That happened to me with German, for some reason my textbook taught a bunch of weird words and when I tried to talk to people, they couldn't understand me.  Much later I found out what had happened.

 

Yeah, it's quite discouraging to get through the lower levels only to find that Chinese gets harder, not easier.  It goes on forever. I compare it to climbing a mountain shrouded in cloud.  You work and work, and sweat's pouring from you. But you're making good progress, you're climbing that mountain. You finally break through the cloud layer...and now you can see the top of the mountain.  It is much, much higher than you ever imagined.  Keep climbing?

[abcdefg]

On 3/31/2022 at 12:15 AM, becky82 said:

From personal communication with private school teachers, it seems many students give up learning Chinese around the HSK4 level.  Or, at least, they stop taking classes.  I'm kind of interested in why.

 

>>"Or at least they stop taking classes." 

 

I would respectfully suggest that quite a few expats living in China just decide to go it on their own after obtaining a foundation. At least, that's what I did. Shifted from taking formal classes to just learning on my own in a more casual, organic manner as part of daily life in a Chinese environment. I essentially began functioning like a native, just learning things I needed to know or wanted to know.  

 

For example, one year I went to professional tea school because I wanted to know more about Chinese tea. Did that instead of attending language school. 

[Jan Finster]

Is this really limited to Chinese? I think most people stop at the advanced beginner to intermediate level with most actilities (playing piano, learning karate, tennis, etc)

 

I also agree with other that HSK lessons are as boring as it gets and beyond HSK 4, you probably do not need a structured course anymore (if you need it at all).

[Woodford]

I had a lot of really naïve expectations around learning Chinese in the beginning. If I had known how much effort it would require, I probably would have been discouraged from continuing in the earlier stages. Because HSK1-6 were built around a vocabulary list of 5,000 words, I thought that if I knew that word list, I would be an expert. Nope. Then my list doubled to 10,000, which I thought would be the "magic" number. Nope. It's similar to what vellocet mentioned above--you climb one mountain peak, and then you realize you're suddenly in the shadow of an even bigger peak that's still ahead. And beyond HSK4, progress feels horribly slow. I'm guessing that it takes 6-10 years of really hard work to reach a decent plateau, and many of us don't persevere in a single interest for that long.

 

 

[mungouk]

From my experience of moving from HSK 4 to 5, I would say that it starts to feel like a teacher is not so necessary anymore at this stage.

 

Since the level 5 textbooks are almost entirely about new vocabulary, lots of it, and mostly moving from everyday language to more formal language used in articles and books, it gets quite a bit "drier", and unless you're engaging with this kind of material it probably feels less useful. Especially if your motivation is to get by in the language while living in China, say.

 

Also, as alluded to above, the exponential increase in vocabulary requirement between levels really begins to feel somewhat overpowering at this point.  I'm sure I'm not the only one to have found that this significantly reduces motivation. 

 

I think this is an indictment of the poor design of the structure of HSK 2.0... hopefully the new structure will help somewhat.

 

 

 

 

[889]

That's a couple of years more or less of college Chinese. Who takes more than a couple of years of college French, German, Spanish etc? It's the customary pattern of foreign language study for all but the most committed.

[黄有光]

I am proud that I have kept up with Chinese so persistently. Just a few more years and I'll be able to say I've been studying for a decade, haha.

 

I want to take it all the way.

[becky82]

I've been thinking about this a lot.  From what I've read, basically nobody sets out with the goal of "mediocre Chinese" or "choppy but functional conversations" or "often getting the gist of what I read".  Goals usually begin along the lines of "I want to read newspapers, or novels" or "I want to be speak fluently" or "I want to watch movies".

 

I'm starting to feel that inconvenience plays a large role.  There's no clear way to achieve these more ambitious goals: do A, B, C, D, and viola, you're now an advanced student.  There's a lack of in-between goals at higher levels (there's no HSK5 1/2) so you don't feel like you're making progress (the "intermediate plateau"): it's as if someone grabs a pile of words, *thunk* drops it on your desk, and says "come back in 2 years when you're done" ("wait, which words are important?  Oh, he's gone.").  And with such a massive pile of words, you end up bogged down in bookkeeping tasks (maintaining databases and progress charts), rather than actual learning.  I spent 2+ weeks with my teacher just figuring out which HSK6 words I struggle with so I could focus on them.

 

I'm interested in how we can make the transition from intermediate to advanced smoother.  I do not accept that it needs to be the hard slog I experienced.

[abcdefg]

On 4/1/2022 at 9:44 PM, becky82 said:

I'm interested in how we can make the transition from intermediate to advanced smoother.  I do not accept that it needs to be the hard slog I experienced.

 

One factor that I remember clearly was the rocky transition from the more casual "spoken" style of textbooks in the early years to more formal language 书面语 in the middle years. It caught me by surprise.

 

I think there might have been something similar on the "shoulder" between intermediate study and advanced study. Instead of a gradual increase in difficulty, suddenly it became exponentially harder. In retrospect, perhaps this was just the transition between "Chinese written for foreigners" and native material, written purely for domestic consumption. 

 

In an ideal world, in an ideal learning situation, perhaps it would have been helpful to introduce some such materials earlier. Just sprinkle them in a little bit at a time as we went along. Let us gradually become accustomed to them. Less shock to the system.

 

One year I lived in an apartment that had a small news stand on the corner. I got in the habit of buying yesterday's paper from the obliging elderly lady who worked there. She let me have a stale 昆明晚报 for only 1 kuai; set a copy aside for me instead of selling them all by weight to the scrap paper recycling guy. I would grind my way through 30 or 40 minutes worth while eating a solo meal or doing some mechanical and monotonous task, then toss it out into the trash.

 

No word lists, no SRS, no nothing except a very few lookups in an old paper Chinese-to-Chinese dictionary. Seemed to me at the time that knowing individual word definitions was only part of the puzzle. Syntax and grammar were often unfamiliar. Newspaper writing seemed also to often be rather "elliptical." What I mean is that things were left out because the writer assumed the reader would still know what he or she meant. 

 

Not that it matters, but I usually read the newspaper out loud. It probably helped get me over "the hump," but eventually the news stand moved away, and I got lazy about finding a suitable replacement activity. Watching TV was not the same, since that was mainly oral, not written. I found oral much easier. 

 

 

[suMMit]

I'm halfway through Hsk 4 and it's just getting more and more interesting to me. 

 

On 3/31/2022 at 4:56 PM, vellocet said:

By the time you're HSK4, you can hold conversations and are basically functional in China.  You'll still miss out on a lot, but you can do things like negotiate with a landlord, call a plumber to get a leaky pipe repaired, talk to people you meet, order from a menu, etc. 

Like vellocet said, I can handle the basic stuff which was the first goal and it's been fun getting to that point. But now, I'm starting to learn how to talk about more abstract things. There have been lots of words I had come across ie. mood, influence, emotion, regret etc etc but not really know how to use them actively and now I'm starting to. This is definitely more engaging than 把杯子放在桌子上。So for me, I'm nowhere near giving up. In fact, I bought the Zero to Hero module to help me with Hsk 4 and liked it so much that I upgraded to the full bundle - so I'm definitely finishing 4 and then onto 5 and 6(I use the earlier videos in the bundle for reference/review). It's also rewarding to be able to understand more on television than I have previously, but I haven't even started on news, world events etc. So there are things that have reenforced that it's been worth it and things to keep me going.

 

BUT, if I didn't live in China and didn't have a Chinese wife and local friends I doubt I'd be nearly as motivated. I also know plenty of people living here who feel like they don't need it,  too much work, or they tried for a while but didn't make any progress, significant other unsupportive, happy with 这个多少钱，我家有五口人，我要蛋炒饭. 

 

I guess for people who don't even live in China, it's sounds fun and interesting at the beginning. Then the novelty wears off, they don't have much chance to use it and Hsk 3 is enough to feel like you can speak some Chinese.

[realmayo]

On 4/2/2022 at 3:44 AM, becky82 said:

I spent 2+ weeks with my teacher just figuring out which HSK6 words I struggle with so I could focus on them.

I think that's the right way to do it: focus on getting better Chinese and then later, if you're close to HSK6 standard and want to take the exam, find the HSK word lists and see what you still need to work on in order to do well. Taking a big list of HSK words as a starting point would be doing it the wrong way around I think.

[黄有光]

My studies improved dramatically the instant I took Imron's advice and started only studying vocabulary from things I actually wanted to understand (novels, in my case).

[vellocet]

On 4/2/2022 at 10:44 AM, becky82 said:

I'm interested in how we can make the transition from intermediate to advanced smoother.  I do not accept that it needs to be the hard slog I experienced.

Ah, but the people who write textbooks - they are Chinese (mostly).  They have no idea about this.  To the extent they do, they did this hard slog while they were young and it was simply expected that young people's lives should be a hard slog through everything.  With a few exceptions, foreigners who write Chinese textbooks had to suffer, so we should suffer too.  Otherwise there might be more people at that high level, and where would that leave them?  Feeling a lot less special for having mastered Chinese, I assure you.  

[realmayo]

On 4/2/2022 at 8:08 AM, 黄有光 said:

only studying vocabulary from things I actually wanted to understand

 

Do discussions for other languages revolve so much around learning from word lists? It's understandable if lots of people are studying specifically in order to pass certain exams (or use those exams to drive progress).

 

But I wonder whether some aspects of learning Chinese - specifically, "characters are a puzzle that we can work out analytically"  - encourage us to treat too much of the language learning process as a "puzzle" or a "decyphering" ... and one where pure relentless analytical grind, i.e. typical "left-brain thinking", is the most effective solution. Not to mention flashcards with algorithms!

 

Yes, pure language skills do reside in the left hemisphere of the brain, and the left hemisphere loves this kind of analytical shut-out-the-world-I'm-busy monomanaical focus on measurable things and incremental progress. But all the fun stuff like like nuance, humour, irony, lyrics, music, as well as putting things into a bigger and more interesting context, are right-brain activities. Most people would give up pretty quickly if they came to think that learning Chinese was only cold analysis.

[Moshen]

I wonder if there's not a self-reinforcing cycle: If most Chinese learners don't persist past HSK4 unless they've got a pressing practical reason to do so, then there would be fewer good learning resources devoted to that level.

 

And as compared with alphabetical languages that have a lot of cognates with related languages, with Chinese it's harder to get past that hump on one's own.

[黄有光]

On 4/2/2022 at 11:44 AM, Moshen said:

I wonder if there's not a self-reinforcing cycle: If most Chinese learners don't persist past HSK4 unless they've got a pressing practical reason to do so, then there would be fewer good learning resources devoted to that level.

To some extent, this is a problem with every language (or at least, every language I've worked with so far). There are loads of materials for beginners, but by the time you reach an intermediate level, there's very little in the way of learning materials. I think the gap is just more keenly felt with Chinese because it is harder to bridge the gap on your own, without the external help, than it is with languages more closely related to English (or whichever western Indo-European language is your mother tongue).

 

On 4/2/2022 at 9:43 AM, vellocet said:

Ah, but the people who write textbooks - they are Chinese (mostly).  They have no idea about this.  To the extent they do, they did this hard slog while they were young and it was simply expected that young people's lives should be a hard slog through everything.

I don't know about with textbooks, but I definitely felt this very keenly when I was attending classes in 天津. If I imagine the ideal language class for intermediate learners and above, I'd say：

• learn some advanced grammar
• have classroom discussions (perhaps with some games or classroom activities to encourage students to talk amongst themselves and with the teacher)
• read basic literature (like Chinese readers, childrens' stories, newspaper article summaries directed at learners, etc) and then have discussions based on those
• have students read texts appropriate for their level, and then have them write summaries and essays covering those texts
• play games in the classroom designed to help students make connections (develop knowledge of collocations, common grammatical mistakes, etc)

And yet, there was absolutely none of that. Instead, what happened was:

• reading dialogues from a workbook
• fill-in-the-blank exercises
• vocabulary tests
• spending 80% of the classroom learning vocabulary from the teacher (5-10 words), plus some grammar

There was very, very little classroom discussion. In fact, our usage of the language was limited to answering questions from the teacher and writing some stuff down. I felt like much of my time in the classroom was wasted.

I can't help but feel that, on the whole, east asian cultures (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan...) just don't know how to teach effectively, especially when it comes to languages. You simply can't teach a language effectively if you're creating an environment where students aren't using the language. 

 

[realmayo]

My experience of studying Chinese in a Chinese university for a while was similar but I don't think you are expected to learn Chinese just by going to class. Outside you class you would be expected to (a) study the texts in the textbooks very thoroughly so you absorbed/internalised their contents and (b) talk to people in Chinese, watch Chinese TV, read Chinese etc etc. I know people from other east Asian countries who studied Chinese in Chinese universities this way and they had excellent language skills after 4 years.

[abcdefg]

On 4/2/2022 at 2:49 AM, realmayo said:

But all the fun stuff like like nuance, humour, irony, lyrics, music, as well as putting things into a bigger and more interesting context, are right-brain activities. Most people would give up pretty quickly if they came to think that learning Chinese was only cold analysis.

 

Well said! Long live the "right brain stuff!" I never had the slightest interest in passing exams; I wanted a command of the language mainly in order to unlock the fun activities. And to make daily life go more smoothly. Less stumbling over mundane tasks.

[becky82]

Your classes sound a lot like the group classes I've attended.  I try to adapt them to my needs.

 

On 4/2/2022 at 8:13 PM, 黄有光 said:

reading dialogues from a workbook

 

I'd practice reading aloud the text before class (typically once or twice per day for about a week) with the aim of improving my oral fluency (speed and accuracy).  I'd usually try to match the speed of the recording (which is quite challenging).  By the time class came around, it would sound fairly natural, but sometimes I would unwittingly use the wrong tone, or pause at an inappropriate place.

 

On 4/2/2022 at 8:13 PM, 黄有光 said:

fill-in-the-blank exercises

 

I think these have value in recognizing collocations.  I didn't mind these.

 

On 4/2/2022 at 8:13 PM, 黄有光 said:

vocabulary tests

 

Hahaha!  I recall a test where the teacher would read aloud a word, and you were meant to handwrite it and give its pinyin, which I found too trivial and boring.  So before class I'd memorize sentences, and I'd write them down instead (or, if there was an unfamiliar word, I'd have to make up a sentence).  I had to handwrite fast too.  That made it more exciting and useful for me.

 

On 4/2/2022 at 8:13 PM, 黄有光 said:

spending 80% of the classroom learning vocabulary from the teacher (5-10 words), plus some grammar

 

 

This was the big problem for me.  I own a Chinese-Chinese dictionary, and the definitions therein are precise.  And the grammar is explained in the textbook (along with YouTube videos, etc.), if you read it.  I don't really need this part (especially considering I would have also read the passage multiple times too), but sometimes the teacher would point out some nuances I wouldn't otherwise know.  I tried to make it more useful by memorizing the dictionary definitions and example sentences, so if the teacher asked me what a word means, I'd be like "[word] has two meanings, the first is a verb where [pla pla pla], such as in [example sentence], the second is...".