How to pass the HSK (advanced) exam

How to pass advanced HSK

I have recently passed HSK level 6 and would like to share some of my methods of study.  These methods are aimed mostly at advanced learners but will be of use to any level of Chinese learner.

Firstly, the advanced test requires more than just being able to recognize a few thousand characters, you need to have a deeper understanding of the characters, a massive vocabulary, and the ability to read and process a lot of information very quickly.

To build on this, you need immersion in Chinese.  Obviously you need to study very hard for hours every day.  Apart from this, your brain still needs to have natural Chinese input.  There are a few ways to get this.

Immersion

• TV, Chinese TV shows are terrible but easy to watch, and good because they all have subtitles in Chinese so you can pause and check unknown characters, words of grammar.
• Audio, using your phone to listen to radio broadcast is helpful, there area lot of stations that just talk all day long and don’t play any music.  It’s also good because they speak super fast and in standard Mandarin, but they will also get callers in who have less than standard Mandarin which can be a good listening test.
• I never listen to Chinese music as a way of learning Chinese, firstly because I think it’s terrible, and secondly there isn’t a large amount of language for the time of a song, in a three minute song you will get a hundred or so words and a few sentences, but three minutes of a TV show will have much more material.  I also find the lyrics hard to hear and are sung without tones most of the time.  However, if you enjoy the music they can be a good way to memorize new sentences and grammar.
• There is a good app called 懒人听书.  This can be used to download all types of audio programs, podcasts, radio broadcasts and audiobooks in Chinese.  You can browse category and find a program you like, download a few and stick them on your ipod or phone.  Listen to them religiously, When you go to work, go shopping, shower, clean the house or do anything by myself listen.  Listen to the same thing over and over, try to build on your understanding each time, pause and look up words.
• The bbc中文网is also a good source of news in Chinese, in preparation for the exam I would give up all other news sources and try to read any many articles as you can a day in Chinese.  It’s not the greatest news site, and a little slow to bring up new stories.  But it’s decent news, and impartial, as opposed to Chinese news sites.
• 网易.  A good app on your phone for news and entertainment.  Contains all news stories, national, international, as well as entertainment news, movies, and funny internet stuff.
• CCTV news channel.  You can stream it off their website, great for listening as most of it doesn’t have subtitles.
• Communication, get out and speak as much as you can.  If you are in China this is easy, go outside and do something, someone will talk to you.  Chinese people are fairly curious about foreigners, and if they find out you can speak any Chinese they will see that as a good opportunity to learn something, and then ask you a lot of questions.  Have a good think about some questions you can ask them back, this will make them very happy to see your interest in them and they will be very happy to talk.  If you are not in China this is more difficult, but there are still ways to communicate with Chinese people.  微信 is a very good app for meeting random people, you can use this to find random people, add them as friends or talk to them. 
• QQ, a good chat program.  Find some friends, add random people and use Chinese.
• Books, if you’re taking HSK 6 you can probably read a book without too much trouble, a kindle is good as you can check character definition quickly with built in dictionary.  Or you can just use Hanping and get some writing practice as well, or go over unknown character or words and just guess what they mean.
• 汉语风 (Chinese breeze) is a series of graded books for learners of Chinese, graded by word count.

Apps

The smart phone is probably the greatest thing in the world for learning Chinese, I have already mentioned it a few times but will go into greater depth now of how to utilize it’s abilities.

• Dictionaries, there are a lot of dictionaries you can download, I think the best is Hanping pro.  It’s a nice simple app, easy to use and has a good selection of words, sentences, 成语 etc.  One of the best things about it is that you can draw characters, this has two benefits, firstly you get writing practice, secondly it saves time that would be spent looking up by radical.  When you are out and about, watching TV or doing anything having your phone by your side is essential, anytime you see a new character you can draw it, check pronunciation and meaning, and then check what words it is used with.  The other great thing about Hanping is that you can star a word or a character, this puts it in to a ‘starred’ list.  You can then go home, and study these new words, characters etc.
• Trainchinese is another good dictionary.
• Pleco
• Nciku
• 成语词典 good for the more rare chengyu that Chinese-English dictionaries don’t have.

Websites

• Nciku
• CCTV
• bbc 中文网
• 淘宝 go and buy some stuff, books, hsk prep books, chinese breeze etc

Writing

• Skritter
• Chinese writer.  Part of the Trainchinese package.

How to study

When it comes to studying, I use a program called Cuecard to make flashcards.  The majority of studying I do revolved around this.  For example I will read through a text in Chinese, look up new words and characters on Hanping, then star them.  Go through grammar and try to understand what the text.  Then I will go to Cuecard, make flashcards for all new words, characters, chengyu etc.  For each card I put Characters on front, then on back pinyin, definition and an example sentence.  I get example sentences from Nciku.com.  After revising flashcards I go back to the text, read though a couple more times and practice pronunciation.

I put flashcards in different categories.

• General vocab
• Characters
• Chengyu
• Writing (characters that I am learning to write)
• Sayings (saying that don’t count as chengyu)

For each category I put flashcards in units of 100.  This quite large amount of flashcards per unit helps with revision and avoids ending up with so many units you lose track of everything.  Also as an advanced learner you will be familiar with a large number of characters, so learning large chunks at a time shouldn't be too much of a problem.

In preparation for the exam I bought a few mock and actual HSK exam papers.  And did these under exam time conditions, then went back to study.  For example the listening section contains three parts.  I would listen to the first part and answer all questions.  Then I would check my answers, and study the transcript of audio, make flashcards for new words, characters and chengyu.  Go through the questions and see which ones I got wrong, and why.  I found for the listening section the language is fairly simple so I studied this by myself.

Then I would move on to reading section, again only do one part, it works out as one minute one question so if the part was 10 questions, I would set myself 10 minutes.  Again, make flashcards, then go back and go through all questions again.  As the language in the reading section is considerable more difficult as well as going through everything myself I would get a teacher to run through all the stuff that I couldn’t understand.

For the writing section, you have to read through a text in 10 minutes and then rewrite it.  You are not allowed to make notes so you need to understand the (what is usually a) story pretty well, it’s 1000 characters so you will have enough time to read through and then go back to any parts you didn’t fully understand.  You can also use this time to look at any characters that you aren’t fully confident about writing and mentally write a few.  To study for this Rather than actually writing the essays I would give myself 10 minutes to read through, then straight after, turn the paper over and write an essay plan.  And also write down any key vocab, chengyu to use in the essay.  And that’s all I’d do.  Well, and make flashcards of course.

For writing in general I made flashcards, groups of 100, I went through the HSK characters list for the characters.  On the front of the flashcard I put the pinyin and definition, then on the back the character.  So I would see the pinyin, definition, then try and write the character.  This works extremely well.  It’s quite difficult, and requires a lot of brain power but after doing the same characters for 20 minutes I would be able to write all of them correctly.  Everyday I would add about 20 or 30 characters and study whole unit.  After studying for a while you can re-organize the character by pass/fail rate and only study the characters you have been doing badly at.  I did this everyday for about half an hour for a couple of months and learned to write about 2000 characters.  It is important to revise old units, not just current unit, as you forget how to write characters ridiculously fast.  However re-learning how to write a character is easy, it usually only takes two attempts.

This was all I did for writing, I barely did any practice essays.  And it got me my highest score in the exam, 76%, which put me in the 90^th percentile.  If you are doing the computer based test you don’t need to worry about this as you can just type the characters.  But, To pass this exam you need to study like crazy, so spending half an hour extra a day on writing isn’t going to be too much extra work.  And being able to write the character means you recognize them better, which also help with reading.

Every day I would try to incorporate

• Reading (HSK papers, bbc news, 网易, books)
• Listening (HSK papers, CCTV, TV shows, radio, 懒人听书)
• Writing (HSK papers , flashcards -new characters, review old characters, Hanping pro, Chinesewriter, skritter)
• Speaking (on the street, friends, restaurant, anywhere in China with Chinese people, 微信， QQ)

By doing a bit of this everyday your Chinese will keep on getting better and better, each aspect of this balanced study will complement each other, for example learning how to write helps with your reading, which helps you learn new words, which helps with your listening, which helps your speaking, which helps your communication skills, which helps your general Chinese.  And when you’re general Chinese is getting better you are on the right track.

So this was how I studied Chinese, obviously everyone has their own methods of studying but this worked for me.  I didn’t study Chinese at university, I came to China three years ago speaking a few words and short broken sentences and have studied on the side of a full time job.  One thing that massively helped me was marrying a Chinese girl who did not speak English.  Spending hours every day speaking to her help with my general language development, and also in the immersion in to the language that your brain needs to start thinking in Chinese.

Generally I tried to do at least two hours every day studying.  But the more the better.

My approach to Studying involved learning large amounts of vocabulary, characters and chengyu every day.  This did mean that a lot of it was forgotten, but inevitably I would run across it again sooner or later, and even though I had forgotten it was still familiar, and I would be angry for not knowing what it was, and that would mean that learning it for the second would stick.

Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world, but it's also a very simple language, and the beauty is that the more and more you learn, the easier it gets.  When you know 2000 characters and new character you see is pretty much a new compilation of other parts you know well.  If you come across a completely new character it is easy to remember for it's uniqueness.  There is also such a limited number of sounds in Chinese that you can learn the whole of pinyin very quickly, and then any new word you come across you know exactly how to say it.

The Rules of China

Rules of China

1. Twins have to wear exactly the same clothes.
2. Whenever concrete is laid, no matter how much of a barrier is put around it someone will tread on it and drive an ebike through it.
3. If you have a haircut, the hairdresser will use spray and gel to stick your hair directly up, no matter how many times you tell them not to.
4. If you are cold, you will get a cold.
5. If you have a baby, you can’t leave your bed, shower or wash for a month after birth!
6. If you get a haircut a month after spring festival, your mother’s older brother will die!
7. If you give your partner a pair of shoes as a present, they will use them to walk away from you, so you have to sell them to your partner for 1 Yuan.
8. Drinking hot water will cure any illness.
9. Drinking cold water will cause all illnesses.
10. If you order food in pizza hut, they will give you the wrong order, even if you speak Chinese, they speak English, or you point directly at a picture and text and say ‘I want this one, this one, this one, THIS ONE!!!’
11. Chinese Medicine is completely proven and verified, anyone who says it’s not is completely insane and doesn’t understand anything about anatomy.
12. Chairman Mao was 70% right, 30 % wrong.
13. Japan is 100% wrong, evil and wicked! 
14. All Japanese people say the invasion of China and the Rape of Nanjing never happened.
15. The Japanese raped and murdered eleventy gazillion Chinese people.
16. Mao caused the death of a few people.
17. In winter, dogs have to wear clothes, otherwise they freeze to death.
18. No matter how squeaky the brakes are on your push bike you cannot get them changed, even though it only costs 1 Yuan.
19. Whilst driving, looking behind has no use whatsoever.
20. If an old person has collapsed on the floor, you cannot help them up.
21. If you get it any kind of car or bike accident you have to fall on the floor and cry out in agony until the police get there to show that you are more hurt than the other party, therefore making it their fault!
22. Foreigners are taller because they drink more milk growing up.
23. Western food has only 2 dishes, burger and chips and steak and chips.
24. ‘pencil box’ and ‘ball pen’ are real words in English because Chinese English teachers say so.
25. Babies and children can pee and poo wherever they want.
26. Crossing the road does not require looking both ways, or even one way.
27. Whilst driving, you do not need to look whilst pulling in to a road, no matter how busy or fast it is.
28. A mobile phone shop has to have a speaker out the front of the shop playing terrible music extremely loudly.
29. If someone holds a door open for you, you are not allowed to say ‘thank you’.
30. You can spit wherever you like.
31. You can throw rubbish on the floor because otherwise the road sweepers won’t have a job to do.
32. When cheers-ing with someone, the rim of your glass has to be lower than the rim of theirs.
33. If someone lights your cigarette you have to tap their hand twice with your finger.
34. ‘medicine alcohol’ despite being over 50% is very good for you!
35. When running, girls have to wave their arms around pathetically.
36. When speaking on the phone you have to raise the level of your voice to shouting volume.
37. You have to stomp your feet as loudly as possible whilst walking up stairs.
38. Putting a few random English words in to a pop song will make it a success.
39. When translating something from Chinese to English, never confirm the translation with a native speaker.  Even if the translation is the name of a spelling competition being held at an English School with 11 foreign teachers. 
40. If there is a very large pothole in the road, there will be a plant or small tree inside.
41. Walking backwards is more good for you than walking forwards.
42. When on your period, you cannot consume anything cold.
43. Chinese men are not allowed to stand within two feet of a urinal.
44. A no smoking sign does not mean no smoking.
45. Girls must take at least 50 photos of themselves with their mobile phones each day, then add funny effects and text and combine them together in to lots of compilation pictures and post them online.
46. Men smoke, girls don’t.
47. Children and teenagers are not allowed to have hobbies, or partake in any kind of recreational activity, they are only allowed to go to school, then go home and do homework until bedtime seven days a week.  However they are allowed to play rule 60.
48. At road crossings, the green man means you are allowed to cross the road, but you still have to watch out for cars as at the same time there are also green lights for cars.
49. Never tread on a manhole cover.
50. Going to the park and standing next to and hitting your back against a tree is a form of exercise that is very good for you.
51. Snack food packaging must be so strong that it is almost impossible to open.
52. Apart from snack food packaging, everything is made shabbily and falls apart and breaks after a few uses.
53. If people fight on the street, you can stand around and watch but can’t intervene.
54. Men can hit women.
55. TV channels are all at random volumes.
56. Adverts of TV are always louder than the TV show.
57. You can’t cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze.
58. When an ambulance is rushing down the road with it’s sirens on you don’t have to move out of the way.
59. All TV show voices are dubbed.
60. ALL Chinese people play a secret game of ‘last one on the train is a rotten egg’
61. You don’t need to stop your car when making a phone call
62. If you do want to, you don’t need to pull over, you can just stop in the middle of the road.
63. You don’t need to wait for people to get off a train before you get on.
64. If someone is fat, or has put on weight, you have to tell them how fat they are.
65. When something starts drawing to a close, you have to leave as fast as you can.
66. In films, Japanese people can not smile, and they can only laugh if they do so whilst killing a Chinese person.
67. Any internal problems in China can be blamed on the Chinese population being so big.
68. If you want to complain about anything to the government, you can only do it on complain day.
69. The numbers on cash machine pin pads are never in the same order.
70. If your phone rings and you are somewhere quiet, rather than rushing to mute it you slowly pull it out of your bag and then stare at it.
71. Chinese TV will only show good things about China and bad things about foreign countries.
72. When a kid gets home they can’t knock on the door but scream “MUM, OPEN THE DOOR, MUM!!!” as the walk up the stairs.
73. If you knock on a door and no-one answers after 3 seconds you have to bang loudly and repeatedly.
74. Fridge freezers are nearly always upside down, as the freezer is on the top so you have to bend down to get the milk.
75. If you take painkillers, you will die an early death.
76. The same music plays when dialling any phone call.
77. In western countries, parents throw their children out of the house when they turn 18, whether the child wants to leave or not.
78. The trucks that spray the roads with water will do their job, even if it is raining heavily.
79. The colour green is good for your eyes.
80. All westerners look the same.
81. When entering a restaurant, every waiter and waitress will ask you how many people in your party.
82. Whenever Chinese people go on any kind of trip they have to buy massive amounts of snack food and water and carry it round everywhere.
83. When using a public toilet for a no. 2 you don’t need to close the door, even if it’s busy.
84. the lower a car revs are the more petrol you save.
85. eating black sesame seeds will make your hair turn black(er)
86. If you fall asleep with anything resting on your chest you will have nightmares.

china random

I  was just taking my dog out for an evening stroll just now when I was walking down the road and nearly stepped on a crab, it took me as quite a suprise when I nearly squashed the little fellow, and then I just stood there staring at him wondering how he got there.  My dog Lucy didn't seem so phased, she took one glance at the little crab and then looked at me, as if she was wondering why I was stopping, which I found strange for a dog, but mind you she has been in China longer than I have so maybe she's just used to things like that.

I found it sweet that the crab had got away from wherever it was being sold, or from whoever had brought it, and escaped the fate of a very hot bath, to roam the streets of Xuzhou late at night.

It reminded me of a while ago when I was in Starbucks in the centre of town with some friends sitting down on the sofas enjoying some coffee and having a chat, when I saw something crawling along the floor right next to us.  I automatically tightened up and pointed at the little creepy crawley thing (which made one of the girls we were with scream for her life) as I realised what it was,  a little lobster.  We were all gobsmacked for a second as we realised a little lobster had just joined us for coffee in starbucks, but then realised that it must have escaped from someone's shopping bag as they stopped in starbucks for a rest after doing some shopping.

There was also another time when I was in a supermarket and came across a fish on the floor in the middle of one of the isles, it had apparently jumped out of it's crowded stale tank and flopped itself all the way down one of the isles.

It seems all the little creatures know what fate beholds them, and try to escape their doom.  But then trey must feel some kind of terror as they are piled in to small containers to get stared by humans and chucked in to bags to be carried away.  It's a sure hell of a difference between their natural environment of a fresh river or the open sea.  But most people don't think about how much a crab can suffer, it's just food, and you need food to live.  And in China now people really want to live, and with such a rich food culture they live to eat.  So the sacrifice of animal cruelty doesn't compare to being able to eat well, espically in a country where 50 years ago 30 million people stared to death over the course of three years.  When you are hungry you can't think about anything else, you just want, and you do whatever you have to do to get what you want.  This pretty much sums up the attitude in China now,  and in all senses of the word the Chinese people are hungry, hungry for food, hungry for change, from the poor man of asia to a global superpower, hungry to get back to their former glory of the most advanced civilisation on earth.  And their appetite is massive, so like the sacrifice of animal cruelty, there is also the sacrifice of the environment, as natural resources are consumed rapaciously in their desire for economic progress.  But this will lead to better living standards, and with better living standards the memories of starvation will seem more distant, and then things like animal cruelty or a grey polluted sky will become more of an issue.

China’s cleanest restaurants

A few days ago I wasn’t in the mood for Chinese and didn’t have much battery left on the ebike to take me far to get anything good.  So after work I wanted to go somewhere on the way home where I could get some non-Chinese food.  Luckily there was a new restaurant that had just opened on the road home so my wife and I decided to go there.  It was a massive fancy new building and I had always found it surprising how they had decided to build such a luxurious restaurant in a not so great location, and unsurprisingly I had never seen it getting much business.  I also knew that the food was not going to be anything great but I wanted to check it out.

I have been in Xuzhou over 2 years now and seen many places like this come and go, they open for a while, look pretty and serve a few customers and then as expected, shut down after a year or so.  So I always found it strange, why do places like this keep popping up, if they all seemed doomed to failure.  And why are they all doing the same thing, a nice environment with bad food.  Surely they would learn from their mistakes.

The photo here is of a tea house that opened near where I work.  This was a really fancy place, apparently they had spend the equivalent of a million pounds on the entrance alone.  With a massive screen that light up the little square at night with nonsensical videos and advertisements, and very funnily sometimes the BSOD (blue screen of death).  This place had a massive grand opening, looked amazing and was a very large place so must have had substantial investment.  I heard rumours that it was a very important person in Xuzhou’s son, and there were also rumours that it was a secret high end brothel.  Anyway after the opening nothing really happened there, you could see all the staff cleaning and standing by the doors waiting for the customers, who never came, and I mean never, I never saw one person who wasn’t dressed in uniform walk in or out of that place.  And considering this was the building next to the one I work at I was going there nearly everyday, and also the gym I used to go to was behind the tea house and to get there I had to walk past the kitchen, which had a glass wall so you could look in and I never saw any of the chefs doing any cooking, or anything apart from standing around and then cleaning if it was late.

So I was always perplexed at how this amazing place could do so poorly, especially as it may have been a certain person’s son’s place.  Surely he had the connections to make a place like that a success, a perfect place for business meetings which hundreds of people could easily be directed to.  But for some reason they weren’t.  And unexpectedly after a year or so the place shut it’s massive beautiful doors.  And I never got to try the tea there (which was apparently at least £50 a pot).

So during dinner I brought up the subject of these mystery business ventures with my wife and unexpectedly she came up with the answer, which hadn’t occurred to me at all.  What she said was that they are massive money laundering scams, someone takes a bribe, then opens a fancy restaurant, and then launders the money through the restaurants earnings until all the money is clean, and then shut the place down.

It seems to make sense, everyone knows that there are massive levels of corruption here, and bribes are being passed out in the $billions.  But with the change of government leaders there has also been a massive crackdown on corruption.  Seen recently with the death of a party employee during interrogation (torture) shanggui extra legal corruption investigations, and also with the Bo Xilai case.  I also head another rumour (many rumours flying around Xuzhou these days) that the certain so and so who’s son opened the tea house did a runner.  This has actually happened quite a lot all over China with the leadership change and corruption crackdown.  Many officials have stepped down from their jobs to save themselves from being found out.

So maybe these short term restaurants and fancy tea houses will soon be a thing of the past.  But I bet there will still be a few more opening up in good old Xuzhou over the next few years.  China may be changing ridiculously fast, but old habits die hard, especially when money is concerned.

toilet misuse

I recently saw this article in the BBC

Wayward China toilet users face fine
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23766837

It says that people who misuse public toilets could face fines, but was a little shady about what misuse of a public toilet actually is.

"New laws that come into force next month in the southern city do not specify what amount of spilled urine would be classed as a violation."

"The regulations were designed to curb the "uncouth use of a public toilet""

I know what it is, I have seen it first hand, a thousand times.  Urinals are Kryptonite for Chinese men, or at least that's what it seems like they are, as they will not get close to one.  I don't know why but they never seem able to stand close and actually urinate in one.

See!

But they seem to have a funny attitude towards toilets, "it's a toilet, so of course it smells".  Even in people's homes they wont put an s bend in the toilet plumbing, so that a lot of homes smell like toilets as the smell reeks out through the drains.

There is also an aversion to using chemicals to clean.  What most cleaners do is use a wet mop and wipe it around.  So of course there is a horrible smell as all the pee water evaporates.

I remember when I went to Nanjing, I went up the coolest building I had ever seen.  A 450 meter top ten in the world sky scraper.  After we got the elevator down I started to need a pee.  And a couple of minutes down the road a ran in to a hospital.  The toilet has horrible, piss everywhere, overflowing bins of used toilet paper and then nowhere to wash your hands.  2 minutes away from one of the most advanced  and highest buildings in the world has a hospital where you couldn't even wash your hands after visiting a stinky disgusting toilet.  They should have saved the money they spent on the tower and bought some handwash!  but that's China.

here is a picture of the birthday card that the school gives out to staff, if you can't read the text very well see below

"When I first saw you you was lickin a ice cream.  Knew you had freak in ya blood from the get go.  Yo you showed a nigga some love from the get go.  Cute, too, so you ain't get caught in the image.  Friends got in I shouldn't have tossed out our business.  So religious"

A beautiful birthday message I'm sure you'll agree

Also the little bear sitting on the cake with his "text here" is very cute.  This is actually a very common Engrish.  You see a lot of advertisments with fancy fonts in English saying "insert text here" over and over again.

Getting the ebike fixed!

You can always see ebikes in poor repair here, squeaky brakes and wobbly wheels seem to be a feature of just about every bike you see.  I used to think that this was just people being lazy about maintenance, but I recently found out what the real cause is.

A while ago the brakes on my ebike were starting to get a little loose, it was taking a bit too long to slow down, and on roads where people pull out and no-one looks where they are going I though I had better get them fixed sharpish. 

Along most streets are little stools with signs up saying ‘vehicle fixing’, they are fairly small with lots of tools, charging stations and gas pumps for tires.  So I stopped at one and told him that the brakes are no good and need to be fixed, he said no problem and swiftly took out a screwdriver and twisted a screw around the rear wheel.  Pumping the brake handles seemed to have solved the problem, they were no longer loose but felt firm and solid.  I gave him 20 p and got on my bike feeling good at how quick and cheap it was.  As I accelerated away though the bike seems to be a little slower than usual (which is very slow indeed) and didn’t reach full top speed, as I was on my way to school for class I though I would leave it for a day and see how it goes.

After school I got back on the bike and started to ride home, the battery was draining fast and the bike seemed to ride like it was constantly going uphill.  I had an inkling of what the problem was and so pulled the bike over and put it on it’s stand, I used my hand to turn the back wheel and as I expected it was very difficult and did not want to rotate without much effort.  The man had tightened up the brakes so much that they were constantly on.

So the next day I took the bike back to him and told him that the brakes were too tight, he looked at him funnily and seemed a bit confused that I had just taken the bike to him complaining that the brakes were too loose and was now complaining that they were too tight.  So I thought I would just let him see, I put the bike on it’s stand and turned the back wheel with my hand showing that it absolutely would not spin unless given a lot of force.  This seemed to have no effect on him and he still looked at me like an idiot who didn’t understand that wheels go around.  So I just told him to loosen up the back brake, he got out his trusty screwdriver and made some adjustments again, I gave the wheel a good spin with my hand and it actually continued to spin by itself for a good second or two so I assumed he had sorted the problem.  I was only going to find out however, you can’t solve one problem here without creating another even bigger problem.

I gave the bike a little test ride, I accelerated up to speed and then gave the rear brake a little pull, expecting a small reduction in speed I was surprised by suddenly coming to a complete halt, the brake had somehow applied itself and giving it the lightest touch will resulted in full on braking.  Ebikes have a nifty feature of cutting the electricity out every time you use the brakes, so you can’t accelerate and brake at the same time, hence saving some battery life.  And with my newly fixed brakes every time I touched the rear brake and came to a complete stop I was left without power for a few seconds as the brake recover from their frantic braking, leaving me only to pedal desperately and shuffle along with my feet.

I though as long as I didn’t use the rear brake, it would be ok, the front brake was still OK and I could just be a bit more cautious, probably better to ride a bit slower anyway.  However, this is the land where people absolutely do not look when crossing a road, people will blindly drive their ebike across a road without seeming to care that a car could pile in to them, so as you can imagine driving around you get a lot of scares, and the involuntary action when someone pulls out in to the road 5 meters in front of you is to at least apple to brakes a little bit to slow down and be ready for an emergency breaking manoeuvre.  So each time this happened I would automatically touch the brakes and then be slowed to a complete stop, whether there was actually any danger or not.  Then have to pedal like crazy to try and unlock the brakes so the power can cut back in.  After a couple of days and many stops I realised I couldn’t take it any more.  So I took it to get fixed.

I rolled up to the old matey with his screwdriver and told him about the brakes were still broken, that they were worse than before and I wanted them fixed.  So he made some more adjustments, I made him loosen up the brake so that it didn’t automatically lock itself and then told me that the problem was the actual brake lever, and he couldn’t fix that, and to get a new one.  When I asked where I could get  a new one, he said “at a shop”.  So I left and though forget it, the rear brake isn’t locking itself now so I’ll just leave it at that.  I got on the bike and started to ride off, I didn’t get far though before unsurprisingly a problem arose.  The bike just died, drifted to a complete stop and the accelerator was unresponsive, the lights were still working and it showed to have electricity but it just wouldn’t go.  I was flabbergasted, I couldn’t understand how one idiot with a screwdriver could brake my ebike just by turning one screw on the rear brake.  But somehow he did, and I soon realised what was the problem, he had somehow managed to loosen up the wire too much, while leaving the actual brake fairly tight.  And this slack on the wire wasn’t pulling the brake lever back so it was just flopping around and this was engaging the energy saving no power while braking feature.  Easily solved though, whilst riding use fingers to push the brake lever forwards, just very annoying while trying to ride.

After a couple of days of this I was on the point of throwing my ebike in to the river, I would have rather have done that than take it back to the screwdriver man.  So I got it taken to a proper repair shop, they said that the rear brake was broken and it needs a new one, which would take a few hours.  So I left the bike with them and went to work.  I came back a few hours later to find my bike ready and a nice new £7 brake system on the rear wheel.  I paid and drive off, I tried the rear brake to see if any disasters had occurred, they hadn’t, the brake worked perfectly, and so perfectly that if you pulled it hard enough it would actually lock the wheel and you would skid.  I drove off back to work feeling very pleased, and safe knowing that I could actually stop every time someone pulled out in front of me.

After work I got on the bike and started to ride home, when I was about a kilometre away from home the bike suddenly started making a funny noise every time I accelerated and then the transmission went.  If I accelerated the motor just made a rotating, grinding noise.  And I think that what had happened was the motor had become disconnected from the rear wheel, funny though, as the motor is the rear wheel.  But anyway, there was no drive and I had to pedal it back home, and then the next day pedal it back to the shop, this was made all the worse by it being summer and incredibly hot and humid outside, also the bolt that connects the left foot pedal to the shaft had come loose, which was in itself another story of repair failure, so that meant I had to stop every 5 minutes and tighten it up to stop the pedal falling off on to the street.   But got it there and they fixed it for free.  And guess what, it hasn’t broken again since!

What this whole adventure really showed me is the lack of skill in professions here, I assumed that a man who made his living out of fixing ebikes would be able to fix a small problem, or at least identify the problem and help me get it fixed.  But in truth he had as much of an idea how to fix it as I did.  I assumed him to be an old master of bikes, but he wasn’t.  All he does is fix punctures and pump up tires, and I don’t know why he needed his little station cart with all his tools layed out looking like he could do a half decent fix of anything, I think that all he really used was a puncture repair kit and a bucket of water.  During one of the visits to him I asked him to put some oil on the chain, and he said ‘I don’t have any oil’, so his wife went round the corner to get some.  The old man makes his living by fixing bikes, and luckily for him there are so many people riding poorly kept bikes on the road, and a lot of poorly kept roads, that a lot of people get punctures, enough to keep him busy every day fixing them.  He doesn’t need to worry about giving a great service so that customers return, no-one’s going to push a bike with a puncture half way across the city to let good ol trusty screwdriver man fix their tire.  They’re going to push it to the closest one.  So when I come along with my bad brakes, he can tighten it a little, maybe solve the problem, but why would be bother delving in to something new when he can sit back and do what he always does, if it get’s him by.

And this seems to be the attitude of many Chinese people when it comes to work, people don’t want a job with challenges, where they have to work out new problems, adapt and make progress.  What most people do here is pay a large sum of money to get a job which is considered good, and a good job has to be stable, so that they have a future.  A future also doesn’t mean great prospects of rises or increases of responsibility, it means to be able to do the same job until you want to retire.  With no stress, an easy office job where all you do is stamp papers is considered a really good job, where you don’t have to be worried about being overworked, you can spend most of the day sitting down not working, have a nice long lunch, and then an afternoon nap.  And do the same thing day in day out.

There doesn’t seem to be a need to be so productive, it’s more about how long you work than what you actually do.  As long as you put your hours in you’ve done your job, and that usually means 6 days a week 9 or 10 hours a day.  You could probably squeeze all the work in to a third of the time if you worked hard, but most people don’t want to work hard, they don’t want the stressful life of maximum efficiency and a heavy mortgage.  They want to not have to worry about work, have enough time to eat good Chinese food and enjoy life.  This is essentially done by being close to your family and eating Chinese food.  And I think this is an admirable way of life for the average person.  Even if it does result in people like screwdriver man who seem to do a half assed job, maybe it’s my fault for over expecting his abilities.  I wouldn’t expect a decent slap up meal from someone selling street food here.  But anyway, I’ll know what to do the next time the brakes on my ebike start getting bad, the same as every one else, nothing!