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A set of vocabulary books for HSK 7-9 have come out too. They're part of a set called 国际中文教育中文水平等级标准·词汇速记速练手册, which have lists for all the HSK levels. I couldn't help myself and bought them on Taobao. They arrived so I made a little video about their contents and put it up here for anyone who might be interested what they are like. The TLDR is they are basically a list of the new vocab in alphabetic order, divided into two books (A-M, N-Z). They've included collocations and fill in the blank questions on most pages as well as at the end of every "unit", which I thought was a nice touch. A quick comparison against the vocab lists that have been OCR'ed (which I admittedly downloaded quite a while ago) showed that some vocab in the books is not in the OCR'ed lists, like 吃不上 and 鹏程万里. It seems to largely correlate though, and probably isn't a big deal.

I've been doing level 4 for ages and have been working backwards and am now in mid-2021. It rarely goes beyond 4 or 5 days before new content is published in a particular level. Whether that's enough for a particular user is up to them but there's so much content now on Chairman's Bao that I'm sure I could now just redo the content I have done and still find it very useful (I haven't done yet). Chairman's Bao just passed the 10,000 article content a couple of days ago so there's so much content on the platform. I've bought the lifetime membership of Chairman's Bao and I've already got my monies worth. I make sure I do an article every day and haven't missed a day in over a year now. Regarding how often new content is published. There's usually one or two new articles each day across the grades, very rarely three. I can't remember ever seeing a day pass without new content. Not a DuChinese payer. Have thought about it and am interested in others comments.

Maybe you should ask the "CSC, Confucius Institute, etc..." in your home country... If a validation code is required, certainly they must be the ones who would give it to you... Just suggestin'... TBZ

These exams are fairly sparse, both with respect to time and distance (there doesn't appear to be any listed on the chinesetest.cn website currently, so the next one will probably be months away). Coincidentally, one of the locations the November HSK7-9 exam was held is Weihai, which is where I live. I'm tempted to make a push for it. I already know something like 70%+ of the vocabulary. We'll see, I guess.

Thanks for being my rubber duck (see rubber duck debugging technique). We just put in a Chinese SIM, enabled roaming, stopped WiFi, force-stopped the Galaxy Store, cleared all its data and reloaded it. After initialisation, and seeing the Chinese apps we disabled roaming and turned the WiFi back on.

My son has just switched from iPhone to Andriod (Samsung) and can't find many of his favourite apps. He's used my wife's Chinese iTunes account up until now on the iPhone, but as Google Play doesn't work in China there's no point using a VPN for it. We tried using a VPN to Taiwan & Singapore (my personal VPN is offline right now) and logging in to the Galaxy Store, but it immediately detects that we're in Zürich even without the SIM card. There surely must be some 老外 with Android phones Samsungs even that they bought overseas and want to use the local apps in China. How did you download them?

@zhongguo_letsgo Yeah I figured it out hopefully. I have no idea when results will come tbh. I'm checking website almost every day.

my biggest issue with AI is that I find real humans have a much lower tolerance for mistakes and will misunderstand you much more frequently. similar experience in the tutor -> native non-tutor jump

Hi there, I have a problem.I am creating account in CSC scholarship, while creating account there is a requirement,they want a validation code but I don't know concerning, could you please help me...

@YantaiflowerFor SJTU at least it was under their humanities courses. I am also applying for the one semester study. Do you have any idea when results will come out??

There were around 500 test takers all over the world.https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/oOhPNzUMp2Va0sC50wh2SQ

Next? Oh that's the question. There seems to be a few potential futures for me: (a) sending my CV around and getting a job (either in maths, or maybe in something like applied linguistics), (b) trying to turn my YouTube channel into something profitable (learn video editing), (c) going for the HSK7-9, or seeing if I can get 70% on the HSK6, or seeing if my HSKK marks could improve (I got 55% on the HSKK), (d) somehow figuring out how to become a Chinese teacher, (e) "touch grass" or go outside more. I'm not actually sure. Winter is coming in China, and I tend to hibernate during winter. Life certainly has a habit of being incompatible with Chinese study. I wish you good luck for the future!

Well done @becky82! You really deserve this, girl! I am going to use your yt videos as motivation to study. As expected, I didn't make it again. I didn't have any time to study. I started my masters and I am taking too many courses. My husbae also came to visit a week before, so I knew there was no hope. I signed up because I was anxious about my uni following up... I also decided to skip the test this month because I had no time. I was considering doing the pbt in December but I missed the sign up date because the test is on the 8th 😭 I am unsure whether to try the IBT again or whether to wait for Jan for the PBT. My uni says I can do the BCT level 5 instead but that's not every month and I don't know anything about it. I have forgotten almost everything I have learned, because I am now studying in English. I need to get it together! I thought the writing part was easier than it has ever been, and I thought I understood the story... But I guess I am delusional... My writing score keeps getting worse 😕 So I might as well do the pbt and do better with the reading part. CONGRATS again!

Congratulations on passing HSK6! That must have felt like a weight is finally off your shoulders. Any ideas on what next after this amazing milestone?

I have officially passed the HSK6, getting just over 60 in each section. I note that I took the handwritten exam, and I have Australian nationality, and I took the exam in China, so I could be taking this exam on "nightmare" difficulty. According to chinesetest.cn's analysis, the global average on the exam I took was 205 (or 68%): The Australian average was 250 (or 80%):

The one on Taobao is only on presale, you can buy it but it will be shipped on 4 Jan 2025. Your JD screenshot says they will start shipping on the 10th of December so I guess it's also just presale. Makes me wonder if I should cancel my Taobao order and buy on JD instead.

FWIW, I was just at a conference in Beijing on this very subject and HSKMock is from the actual HSK developers, and they confirmed to me that it uses the same algorithms as the real HSK test for stuff like evaluating your pronunciation. So it should be a very good proxy for the actual HSK7-9. (and putting my Pleco hat on, we're discussing ways we can also offer these sorts of high-quality mock tests in or through our app, and that plus a couple of other HSK things are why I was at that conference)

funny you should say that! That's my last 6 months (trying it, not arguing it)

But only in the sense of their production (or 'procedural knowledge'), not their description (or 'declarative knowledge').

just hit them with the ɕ next time

I really enjoyed this show, I'd say definitely worth a watch personally!

I'm not sure whether you're trying to say x is pronounced the same as s followed by y, are whether you're just saying this is an approximation. To my ears at least, there is still a difference.

This was an issue at the time the Three Gorges Dam 三峡大坝 was being built. I once took a "shore trip" to a hill where some such tombs had been moved. Guide talked about it. (Was on a boat trip down the Yangtze 长江。)

I absolutely agree with @TheBigZaboon's idea. And more academically speaking, modern linguistics tends to take a descriptive point of view - that is to say, the native speaker is 100% percent right about their mother tongue, and the linguists aim to find the laws behind these language phenomena. Absolutely, the majority of Chinese you could meet in China have this or that kind of accent. 90%, maybe more native speakers don't speak like news reporters do. But we are still more sensitive to those subtle differences of pronunciation. And generally, pronouncing the Pinyin "X" as "sh" in English is tolerable, BUT that doesn't means that sounds correct to native speakers. I'd rather say pronouncing "X" as "Shee" or "See" is a typical example of "the accent of foreign speakers". So do the Pinyin "J" and “Q”.

I just watched 隐秘的角落 (2020, #episodes: 12). Maybe it's because there are kids involved, but I found it a bit too gruesome and didn't really enjoy watching it. The plot is also absurd at times, the book probably explains some things better than the show.