Is it possible? HSK 6 in 1 year?

[npmontgomery]

I have been in China teaching English and I have a decent command of conversational Chinese. I plan on studying full time here at a university and plan on speaking no English and really hitting the books. I have heard that there are people that have obtained HSK 6 level in one year but am wondering if any one else has heard anything like this. There are several reasons for my needing this score in one year. Any other opinions? Advice?

Cheers!

[anonymoose]

Of course, nothing's impossible, but I'd say it's fairly unlikely.

You say you have a decent command of conversational chinese? What does this mean? You can order a beer or you can hold a conversation about, for example, the pros and cons of smoking?

The intermediate HSK does not contain a speaking component, so having a grounding in chinese will obviously help, but what you really need are reading and listening skills. Unless you already know some characters, I think it'll be quite a challenge to learn enough characters and combinations (ie. vocabulary) within a year to reach HSK level 6.

[npmontgomery]

I know about 900 characters and can hold conversations on several topics other than liking beer and rice (admittedly, not in the depth that I would always like to, but long conversations of an hour are indeed possible). I am not as concerned about listening, with all my conversation I have had a decent amount of practice (much easier than speaking). It will be a lot of work (and a lot of writing characters and memorizing vocab. lists), but with the right number of hours, has anyone heard of this sort of thing being done before?

I know I have a long way to go, any suggestions on how to get there? Any specific things you have done in the past to prepare?

[yonglin]

I knew far fewer than 900 characters when I took the HSK two years ago, and still got a 5. On the other hand, the higher HSK level you're at, the more challenging each additional level becomes (improving from, say, 2 to 4 is a lot easier than improving from 4 to 6). Still, I'd be surprised if you couldn't do it in a year...

I bet your greatest weakness is reading, so you need to do a lot of reading practice and also improve your reading skills. You can earn a lot of marks just by learning to read in the right way, i.e., inferring character meaning from context or ignoring characters you don't have a clue about but still understand the content of the article. I found 读者 to be pretty good for elementary/lower-intermediate reading.

[magnusgren]

With the level you say you're at as a base, I'd say reaching HSK 6 in a year should not be overly difficult with some serious study, focusing obviously on reading skills (the other ones are comparatively easy and natural). I didn't take the intermediate exam directly after my first year of study, but scored an easy 3 on the elementary, after another eight months or so in China I scored a stable 8 on the intermediate.

[anonymoose]

I know about 900 characters

Well, that's a pretty good start already.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with vocabulary lists (at least, I never have), but try reading authentic material, and learn vocabulary in context from that.

By the way, the HSK seems to have a bias towards scientific topics, so that might give you a direction to work in.

[Xiao Kui]

I think it's definitely doable, considering the foundation you already have. 2 recommendations: use an SRS like anki or mnemosyne to learn more characters and words and find a good graded reader to improve your reading comprehension.

[Meng Lelan]

I found 读者 to be pretty good for elementary/lower-intermediate reading.

yonglin is that available online for free?

anonymoose,

Is HSK really going more scientific? I thought it was more on business and finance topics?

[anonymoose]

Is HSK really going more scientific? I thought it was more on business and finance topics?

I don't know if it's an official policy or anything, but the times I've taken the HSK, there always seems to be a scientific bias, especially in the reading. That's of course not to say that there aren't other topics, but there always seem to be topics about animal behaviour or botany, and things like that.

I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone cram on science as a strategy for passing the HSK, but simply if one is to do casual reading to enhance reading skills, it might help to include some material on the above topics.

[yonglin]

yonglin is that available online for free?

Not that I'm aware, unfortunately. Here, a large number of public libraries subscribe to it, but maybe that's not the case in areas with fewer Chinese people around.

[Scoobyqueen]

I think it is doable especially if you plan it out.

As far as I know you need to get a six in all four sections (correct me if I am wrong here anyone) in order to get an overall score of six. If so, I would identify which of the sections need improvement. You can do mock tests to find out. After that, I would focus on the sections that need improvement or that are an impediment to obtaining a six. This will be different for different people.

In my opinion doing well at the HSK exam has a lot to do with exam techniques and pattern detection. For example, in the listening section you can read several questions ahead which prepares you for the type of question coming up.This book is useful for that.

The listening section furthermore contains a number of colloquial terms. Roddy suggests a useful book on this thread.

For the reading section, you will need scanning and speed reading skills. This site has some excellent reading material that also lets you know how you improve over time.

The zong he section can be tricky. It typically involves knowing the differences between four similar words, or choosing the right fixed expression for the context. However, these tend to come in patterns that can be learnt in advance. I think however that you may need to get at least several characters right for the final 20 questions where you need to write in order to get a six.

Edited May 27, 2009 at 10:20 AM by Scoobyqueen

[roberts187]

My Son,took the hsk exam in april(first time)and made a 6

listening-6

cloze-6

grammar-7

reading-8

He has had 4 yrs of study in the States.

8 months at a university in China .

[muyongshi]

As far as I know you need to get a six in all four sections (correct me if I am wrong here anyone) in order to get an overall score of six. If so, I would identify which of the sections need improvement.

At the risk of being wrong myself I believe you have to get a minimum of a 6 in 3 of 4 sections and the 4th one can be no lower than a 5 (one below the others) to get the 6. So a 6, 6, 7 and 5 (or 6,6,6 and 5) would all result in a 6. Whereas a 6, 5, 7, 7 would still only result in a 6.

[roddy]

Muyongshi is right, for the old-style HSK at least. Details here, but basically if you want a six, you need 6-6-6-5 at a minimum. 6-6-5-5, or even 8-8-5-5, will work out as a 5. I think.

[尼奥思维系]

Yonglin wrote - 'I knew far fewer than 900 characters when I took the HSK two years ago, and still got a 5'

Yonglin. I'm really interested to know how you got a 5 with so few characters. I know 2000 plus characters, read newspapers,books and have been in China for 5 + years but couldn't even get a 4!

I think back to when I knew 900 characters and can say that I wouldn't even be able to read the basic instructions for the test with so few characters. I certainly would be missing a lot of characcters in all sections of the test that are needed and can't work out how you got a 5 in this state.

[roddy]

What was the breakdown of your scores? That does seem pretty low for what you say you can do - but if you completely bombed out of one section that would explain it.

[尼奥思维系]

Can't remember exactly

I got a 5 in grammar and I think 3's in the others. I forgot to do the last section where you have to write hanzi so I guess bombed on that but isn't that just a small part.

I'm doing the listening mocks but still don't feel confident ...

[yonglin]

尼奥思维系, you are right: I could not read all the words in the instructions. But having done a couple of mock tests, I kind of knew what I was supposed to do. If you can read and understand newspapers in Chinese (I cannot), I cannot understand why you didn't do better. After all, the 初中 tests reading more than it tests anything else. Is it that you just did not do any mock tests? I found that I had to learn a few key words to describe 态度 for the listening section so that I could understand the alternatives. I really don't know.

[roddy]

That does seem pretty odd - I'd assume you're just better at Chinese than at taking Chinese exams, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Would suggest a few practice tests, some study using HSK prep books and then see what happens.

[尼奥思维系]

hanks for the ego boost Roddy!

To be honest I don't think I'm that good at Chinese but I was disappointed with my HSK. I might be bigging myself up a bit too much with the newspapers. The truth is I can read them with a dictionary but pretty much any article I can translate by picking up a paper and reading. Some articles are easier than others of course. I was having problems with some finance articles the other day.

I've worked out a theory that is probably wrong. I realise that I can read most characters I see in a paper. I can pronounce them often but don't always know the meaning(hence the dictionary). There are others that recognise half those characters but still do better than me on the HSK. I often know the single hanzi meanings to words if you break them down.Perhaps this is because I learn by breaking down words into their smaller parts and I have a good knowledge of these individual hanzi and their meanings. Perhaps I just don't know enough of the combined hanzi meanings or simply enough words!

So today I've began to learn word lists for the HSK. I'll give that a shot. I just went through the first thousand and I know them all. Perhaps I just need mock exam practice too. No I didn't do any mock exams before the test yonglin so I'm gonna drop newspaper reading for a while and strictly study HSK.

Thanks and any more ideas I appreciate. This forum is great!