BLCUP exams are the most difficult, in my opinion

[milin]

A lot of people know the books with 10 test exams from BLCUP. But I have found 2 new books of the same publisher (Beijing Language and Culture University Press). 1 again has 10 exams, but is from 2012 instead of 2010 (so hopefully it uses the new vocabulary, introduced in 2012), and the other one has 6 exams (I haven't looked at that one yet).

I use Supermemo to train the over 11.000 words and characters that I know. Every time I encounter a new word, I add it to my database, but I don't add an item to my training until I've encountered it in 3 different situations. Because this implies to me that it is a relatively frequently used item.

With every item I enter, I also enter a code, to indicate in which book or on which site I encountered the item. So after doing the first exam from the new book with 10 exams, I could easily count how many new items I added to my database. I'm just referring to the reading part of level 5 HSK.

I added 194 new items, and 37 of them were level 6 ones. But since there are already about 700 level 6 items in my training, the number of level 6 words in the exam probably was even a lot higher.

Personally I think it's quite amazing, that I have to add almost 200 new words in 1 exam, while I already made about 20 level 5 exams, and that so many of them were level 6. So I think the BLCUP exams are definitely more difficult than those of Peking University Press, which are more difficult than the official ones.