OCTOBER 15 ADVANCED HSK

[heifeng]

ADVANCED HSK 10/15/2006 Summary (please add on for those of you who attended Sundays Exam)

Listening:

I always find the actual exam’s listening much more difficult than any practice exams or review books. Yikes, maybe it’s just nerves though. I think I blocked the memory of Part I. For Part II all I remember was that there was an interview with Yao Ming about an activity he was involved in regarding bone marrow donation and something about people getting involved blah blah blah….if you go to http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200509/05/eng20050905_206524.html it shows he actually did take place in such an event, so this give you an idea of what kind of listening they have in Part II, for example Yao’s voice is really deep and has Shanghai accent too. I happen to have Yao’s video about him coming to America to play bball so I’m familiar with his speaking, but I don’t think that helped me and maybe even affected my answer selection. I think Part II had 2 long dialogues (the one with Yao and the another one) with 5-7 questions per dialogue and then 2 short dialogues ones with 2 questions each. The second to the last one I don’t think my hearing could hear the low frequency of the speakers voice so I don’t think I got those right…grr…..For some reason I didn’t think listening was as bad as April’s exam, but I also didn’t think I personally did great either =(.

Reading:

I thought reading was pretty challenging this time, more so than last time. I think I left 2 questions unfilled in the part I and filled in a few of the last few questions with “c”. I have a feeling this was my worst section. Part I, seemed to have less answers that you could directly copy onto the answer sheet, so It seemed to require a bit more time to complete it than I had anticipated… I don’t remember that much about the articles on part II although there wasn’t anything on Tea.

Zonghe

It seemed that many questions were taken by from past exams. It didn’t seem extraordinary difficult, but I personally almost screwed up big time by filling in section 4 horizontally instead of up and down, only to realize it at the last minute! Let me tell you I have never erased and rewritten so quickly in my life.

Writing: Similar to a practice question I have seen before: Wang Qiang is about to graduate from college. One of his classmates who graduated a few years ahead of him opened his own company and is very successful. One of his other classmates is working for a large company. Wang Qiang is interested in both, but can’t decide. Give him a suggestion on what choice to make. (summarized version)

It thought this was pretty straight forward, maybe easier than April’s 一分钱一份货question….I just have a problem with writing incorrect characters. I finished with 3 minutes remaining so I think I caught some of them…

Spoken:

The 朗读 was shorter than I remember. About a guy who buys a picture of a 美女 playing the flute. However, I think I still managed to screw this up big time. Why you may ask, because every time it read 长笛 I read 长萧 (now my friends are saying 我的思想太不健康....omigod....this is going to be bad, I'm not even going to explain the meaning of what I said but let's just say somehow I completely changed the meaning of this story to the x rated version... ) and just to make it worse I think I read 乐曲 le qu once and then caught myself and read yue qu the second time. Simple, very costly mistakes. I think any progress I have made in my tones has been cancelled out buy those mistake! 郁闷死了！

My foggy memory of what the questions were (summary):

Question 1: what time of polite behavior/courtesies to you need to consider when you are at a sporting event.

Question 2: These days many students study in their home country and abroad. What schooling method do you think is the best, why?

I had been going to Writing and Speaking 补习班mainly for the writing section. I didn’t think I could necessarily get an 11 on speaking, but was thinking a 10 would be pretty manageable. Now I think that personally this was just probably my most disappointing section just because I had the highest hopes for it.

Overall, prior to the exam I was hoping for a 10, or at least trying to be optimistic. If you check out my previous posts from after last April’s, I bombed writing last time so I couldn’t get the level 9 certificate despite total points amounting to that. My overall impression is reading was my worst section this time.

My Korean friends, one of each already has a 9 and the other a 10, also felt reading and listening were difficult, so maybe if we all did poorly, the overall will be boosted a bit. (somehow I will try my best to stay optimistic until I pick up my envelope and it’s disappointingly thin…..then I’ll just come back to this post and whine….)

Ok, that’s it for now...feel free to fill in the blanks or correct my summaries of questions.

I'm also added the C-Test data on another post!

[wushijiao]

My analysis/feeling are fairly similar to heifeng's.

Listening- I knew going into this that I had to do well on this section, and I ended up really hurting. I find those long, idiomatic, quickly-spoken four-minute soliloquies in Part 1 (questions 1-25) to be damn hard. There are some that I felt as if I were just blindly guessing. And I felt the test went downhill from there. Part II, with Yao, I found quite a bit easier. Dialogues are always much easier to understand, partly because I think it resembles natural speech more than the first part. But maybe that’s just me.

Reading- I bombed this section. This biggest problem is that I did a textbook example of how you don’t want to allocate your time. Also, one of the examiners checked my sheet and found that I had written the wrong number on my sheet, and she made a big deal about it, bringing me an eraser. This wasted at least 30 seconds to a minute of my time, not to mention concentration. It’s really hard to overestimate how efficiently you have to use time in the reading section. So, if I don’t pass, the reading section will almost surely be the culprit.

Zonghe- I felt that this section wasn’t too bad. Easier than last time

Writing- The biggest problem for me on this is that I can think of at least 5 or 6 characters that I wrote incorrectly. For this section, I don’t think my writing was 9 quality, but I don’t think it deserves to fail either. So if I get in the “below the 9, but not a fail” section, that means I would need to get 9’s in Listening, Reading, and Speaking. Since I’m pretty sure that my reading sucked, I’m pretty sure I won’t pass it this time, unfortunately.

Speaking- I didn’t find this too hard, except that I didn’t really understand what question 1 was asking. Heifeng remembered it correctly, I think, but it seemed like such a bizarrely worded question. Also on the speaking, I had a least two intelligent sounding things written down on my paper (from the 10 minute planning time you get). Stupidly, I forgot to say both. I think next time I will make a checklist, making small boxes next to the points I want to get across. Still I think I did ok here, unless the grader is real strict about tones.

All in all, a really poor performance by me. On the other hand, I only halfheartedly prepared for it, and I didn’t put too much stress on myself. I recently went from teaching full time and studying in my free time, to doing the opposite. So I’m fairly certain that I’ll make some big progress in the nest six months.

I’m also going to write characters a good 20 minutes per day, so that I won't have to cram on characters two weeks before the test, which impedes cramming in the other sections.

[heifeng]

Listening

Wow, that's probably why I have no memory of Listening Part I, I clearly blocked the memory of the horror of it all.

Reading

Crap! the proctors just love to stand behind the western students and watch them write for the Reading part I, don't they!?! One guy stood behind me for must of been 3 minutes (or maybe just one really long minute). Threw off my concentration a bit too.

Writing

5 or 6 characters that I wrote incorrectly

I think I just can't think of the ones I wrote in correctly yet but luckily I found one 不 that I wrote as 还 (wtf) right before they picked up my exam.

Kouyu

Yeah, after memorizing a gazillion chengyu and suyu I don't think I said anything really intelligent during the kouyu either. It's funny how easy it is to draw a blank (or say the completely wrong character) at the critical moment!

But at least we tried and we keep going back for more!!

万事贵在坚持，坚持就是胜利

[wushijiao]

But at least we tried and we keep going back for more!!

Exactly. Except for the 400 kuai test fee, and a bit of embarrassment in not passing, I don’t really see any reasons not to take the test. Assuming that I failed, I still think that I learned quite a bit of useful stuff from preparing for it. I think learning many of the common word collocations, idioms, and fixed grammatical patterns (ie. 即使．．．也) on the zonghe is a really useful in understanding more difficult written material.

Eventually I’d like to get a 10 (or 11, but I don’t think that is feasible).