Beyond the HSK vocabulary lists

[peterlkj]

Hi guys,

I've finally finished (I think it took about 3 years on and off) with the level 1-4 HSK vocab lists with pleco, and think it's probably the best thing I could have done for my Chinese.

I can now read pretty much anything and get the gist of it, but there are still way too many gaps in my knowledge to make it smooth sailing.

I was wondering if there are any other good lists out there, with maybe another 5000 words or so. There are quite a lot of good advanced level materials with interesting vocab, but it's a pain to add word by word. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[rezaf]

I think there are dictionaries out there designed for HSK with about 8000 words. Just buy one and memorize all the words.

Personally I paid a few Chinese students(very cheap price) to choose all the useful words they know in spoken and literary Chinese from a dictionary. As my list has been edited quite a few times I don’t know the exact number of words and expressions but I guess it’s around 35000. However this list is actually the size of a vocabulary of an average educated Chinese student. One thing that you can do is to buy one of those smaller dictionaries that are designed for Chinese middle school or elementary school students(they usually contain around 20000 words) and hire a Chinese student to choose the more common words for you. Anyway my method of learning vocabulary is a little bit old-fashioned, I think Snigel(one of the members) might have better suggestions.

[Silent]

How about creating vocabulary lists of books that interest you? That way you get vocabulary that's relevant for you and not some 'random' words from a dictionary you will 'never' see. To prevent learning rare words that occur only in one book you might even choose to add some rules like the minimum number of occurrences and the number of books that use the word.

[rezaf]

@peterlkj: How many words does your HSK vocabulary list have?

[chird]

I downloaded the list of most common Chinese words taken from movie subtitles, and imported the top 99% of words into Pleco. I set Pleco to ignore any word which I am already studying via HSK and textbook flashcards (~10,000), and also skip any that don't have a definition in the ABC dictionary.

Assuming this list really is approximately the most common Chinese words in order (it is a bit America-biased due to the source material), as a rough guide, to get to a 95% reading level one should know the first ~8000 of these words (which include 2406 unique characters). To get to 99% requires ~25,000 (3933 unique characters). I read elsewhere that 95% word comprehension is the level at which reading texts in a foreign language gets easier, and 99% is pretty close to a native high-school graduate.

I'm still working on the HSK flashcards first, almost completed. Flashcards have been a massive part of my study thus far, mainly because I like it, progress is measurable and find reading interesting, but I worry it is perhaps to the detriment of speaking and listening practice. Currently I seem to be able to read a lot of words, but when I'm on the street gabbing away they're all hidden away in my passive memory. So recently I've tried switching to three profiles in Pleco - respectively testing reading words aloud, speaking (recalling how to say an English word/meaning in Chinese), and listening (recalling what a Chinese word means from the sound alone).

How connected would you say improved reading ability is to speaking and listening skills? Say lots so I stay motivated.

[WestTexas]

If you only did HSK 1-4 you could go ahead and do HSK 5. I feel like most of the words on HSK 5 are useful and fairly common, unlike HSK 6 which IMO contains some rather dubious word choices which are either uncommon or very niche (颈椎 anyone?).

Beyond that, I would suggest you get a list of the most common characters. Start at maybe 200-300 (you should definitely know everything before that quite easily) and go down the list to 1500 or 2000 or so (however far you want), seeing if you can (1)pronounce each character and (2)Either say it's basic meaning or at least use it in a word. For the characters you get wrong, add them to your Anki deck. You can do the same thing with a list of the most common words, just go down the list to 3000 or 5000 or however many and add whatever you don't know to your Anki deck (or whatever vocab tool you happen to use). Going down the list of the most common words really helped my reading ability.

[rezaf]

It won't stay dubious if after a few years you get 頸椎病

Edit:呸呸呸！Sorry不想咒你生病。

[peterlkj]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the comments - actually I was referring to the HSK sets from Pleco with close to 9000 words in total. Agreed, there are some pretty odd words in there that probably don't warrant the effort - but memorizing them has made a huge difference to my language ability. The effect on reading is obvious, but without getting drawn into a discussion on the merits of different ways of studying, it's also made a big difference to my use of vocabulary and even the occasional chengyu when I speak, and watching TV and movies (with subtitles turned on) seems to be a great way to improve listening comprehension too.

@Chird - that sounds like a great idea - do you happen to still have the files handy? Also, is there an obvious setting to avoid the duplicates from the HSK decks?

[heifeng]

It won't stay dubious if after a few years you get 頸椎病

乌鸦嘴！ haha

alas, have you checked out the 'Random New Word of the Day' thread? Here we try to uncover the last 5% of words you will ever need in Chinese

Other than that, if you commit to reading 1-2 newspaper articles a day you are bound to find new words, especially chengyu.

Let me introduce you to this thread started by yours truly..朗读-A-Day

Of course maybe you are looking for flash cards, so sorry I cannot help ya there, but hopefully these other threads will offer you some assistances.

[imron]

I was wondering if there are any other good lists out there,

Yes, they are called books, newspapers, magazines and so on With a vocab of 9,000 words you should really be starting to look at this. I know you mentioned you find it a pain to add them word by word, and really it is, however if you just approach a book/newspaper article as just a long list of words, then going through and adding them to flashcards in Pleco is not really that much more tedious than just going through a random deck. Especially if you have an electronic copy of the text, then this can be done in very short amount of time using the Pleco reader.

I can now read pretty much anything and get the gist of it, but there are still way too many gaps in my knowledge to make it smooth sailing.

I've found the best way to fill in gaps is to find something with gaps, and then learn those gaps. And then keep doing that. Before too long the most common gaps will be have been filled, and the gaps that are still there will be getting shorter and shorter and further and further apart.

[imron]

Also, for good first book ideas, check out our thread on 活着 (although group reading of this has finished, there's nothing to stop you reading it alone, and there will still be plenty of people around to help answer questions), or

圈子圈套 which is just about to get underway with a group reading.

[imron]

If you only did HSK 1-4 you could go ahead and do HSK 5

Back in the old-days when there were 11 HSK levels, there were 4 vocabulary levels that spanned those 11 levels (I forget the exact breakdown). Most HSK vocab lists floating around the intertubes are based on these and given the total words the OP mentioned were in the deck, I'm guessing it was these older lists, rather than anything mapping to the current HSK.

[peterlkj]

@imron - hehe, I just started reading the December Book of the Month this morning after my posting - topical reading as I'm about to start a 3 month project in Beijing's hi-tech sector from Monday.

@chird - I took the top 30,000 words from the list you mentioned, and after overlaps, made myself another 22,000 flashcards - should keep me productively engaged for a few more years!

I know "real reading" is a lot better, and I do plenty of it (I especially like the dual-language books with English on the opposite page, as so often you can know every word in a sentence and still be lost as to the meaning). I tend to read the thin green cover ones (I think from FCLP) - my biggest bug bear about them is that the English books they've translated are all so dated.

[rezaf]

I doubt that the frequency list from subtitles is very reliable. Just briefly had a look at that list. It is good but not completely reliable(maybe they didn't choose the right movies). There is a lot of nonsense in the first 30000 words and there are many useful words after them, also there are some common 成语s missing but altogether I think it can help me to some extent in editing my own list.

[Silent]

I know "real reading" is a lot better, and I do plenty of it (I especially like the dual-language books with English on the opposite page, as so often you can know every word in a sentence and still be lost as to the meaning). I tend to read the thin green cover ones (I think from FCLP) - my biggest bug bear about them is that the English books they've translated are all so dated.

I understand you learned all the vocabulary of old HSK. From the top of my head that means 8840 words. I think you really should read without a translation. First of all, translations s#ck. Only one meaning is translated while many words and sentences can be multiple interpretable. Also, a good translation is usually a quite liberal translation as a near literal translation is seldom a good read. So the translation may point you in a direction of what it means, but is often an 'incorrect' translation. I think it's far better to put in a bit more effort and to work it out yourself or just accept that you miss points. Solving the puzzle yourself has far more educational value. You may get back to them later and reread. Rereading the same material may no be the most exiting thing to do, it can however be very motivating as you will clearly notice the progress you made.

If it's really key or you feel it's a learning point there is always the possibility to ask a native or on a forum.

[Areckx]

One of the first steps is realizing that you need to be okay with not understanding absolutely everything. Guess, guess, everybody guess!!! (Taiwan talkshows are my favorite, 哈哈哈 ｍ（・ｗ・）ｍ　囧

[imron]

I agree with Silent to ditch the translations, and especially the dual-language books. There's a lot to be said for struggling with native materials rather than having a quick reference available on the other side of the page in English. That struggling is actually your brain learning and coming to grips with the Chinese language. If you shortcut that process then what you are doing is preventing your brain from figuring out how to cope with native material and you'll find that you don't make so much progress.

To expand upon what I was talking about earlier, you could spend another two years learning another 5,000 words (based on your above figures of 9,000 in 3 years), however at the end of that time when you then try to read some material you're still going to run into the same problem. That's because after a certain level, the problem is not so much the gaps in vocab, but rather trying to figure out how to put together the vocab you do know and figure out the grammar of a sentence and put it all together in a way that makes sense and that can be read in a reasonable amount of time without needing to translate each part of the sentence to and from English.

That's a completely different skill that you can really only practice through reading, and lots of it. Vocabulary building can help, but only to a certain degree, and reading is always going to feel like it's a struggle until you've done enough of it.

[Areckx]

Plus... there is a huge, and I mean vastly huge, amount of materials to enjoy in the Chinese language. It's the reason I'm learning it. I'm not trying to reach a point and say to myself "okay, I know Chinese now!" rather, I'm constantly reviewing what I already know while adding to it, exposing myself to the content that I'm studying, which is the content that I want to be reading and watching when I finally do "become fluent in Chinese."

Rather than avoiding "advanced" or "native" material, I'm making the leap to it now rather than later.

There's no point to get to. It's a constant journey.

[rezaf]

People have different methods for learning. I have read a few novels so far and usually read a few newspaper articles everyday but I don’t like to spend too much time on them at this point. Learning a vocabulary list is much more enjoyable for me and has proved that it can speed up the learning process (for me). I think a few other people who are using this method have also mentioned its benefits in this topic and other topics. However I agree it should be accompained by some reading, writing, etc.

Edit: I think no matter what method we use, as long as we study hard we can get close to native level in 10~15 years. So if someone enjoys learning a vocabulary list then there is no harm in spending a few of those years focusing more on a vocab list.