Friday 4 July 2014

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 90th 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.

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