PinyinSudoku

    学无止境 - There's no end to learning, so keep on...

Saturday, August 22, 2015

HSK 3 Test

After playing around with learning Chinese, discovering characters and sounds, composing sudokus, looking up words in songtexts and singing along, I had finally decided to follow a more strategic approach. And to take a test to see where I stand. If I were to start over, I would probably go along the HSK levels right away. Those word lists, sorted by frequency of use, are really useful! 

It's not that I didn't have a text book from the beginning (meanwhile, I have several haha), but the lectures seemed a bit canned. Also, since after the evening school's introductory course, I was the only one interested in taking the next level, I was kind of forced to continue on my own. Talking to friends I made along my learning journey helped me a lot, especially with pronounciation. Engaging in 1:1 language "Tandems" seems to be the most efficient way of learning for me. In a class setting, you can only ask so many individual questions, and it's nice to help someone else improve their knowledge in your mother tongue along the way. Let alone saving money along the way, too, because you don't need to pay a teacher.

So after catching up with some of what I could have learned already, on June 14th, I finally took my first HSK test to check how far I have come. The learning material found online didn't seem overly complicated, so I was quite relaxed during test preparation… haha... I lived to regret it!! If you ever take any HSK test, better work you face off to prepare for it. The day was horribly hot, in the testing room it was even hotter, which didn't really help to concentrate, but at least we had a laugh while listening to phrases about broken hotel 空调 [空調] kōngtiáo air conditioners 😜  What really affected us though, was the amount of text to work through in each question… It was at least twice the amount of text per question, compared to the example tests! 😳😱😵

However, we all tried our best, and well, at least I passed!! Out of 300 attainable points, I got 232, so probably not all too bad. 180 were the minimum for passing. Every category could have gotten you 100 (listening, reading, writing). I was surprised I did best in the listening category, as I had mostly read and written so far, but then the sheer amount of text to process during the test was just ridiculous, as I have already mentioned, and they probably make the listening part the easiest, for foreigners to not lose all hopes of ever making any progress in the language haha! 😆

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