HSK computer based exam has no value

[Guest realmayo]

ZhangKaiRong: my point is that if you're already good at your job in, say, the UK, been working there for 10 years, whatever, and you decide you want to go work in China for a few years -- fluent Chinese wouldn't put you at an advantage? Really?

[imron]

And most of the foreign lawyers which are in china do not speak chinese, and among those who speak chinese, very few (not to say almost no one) can properly read and interprete chinese laws by themselves

This is the opposite of my experience.  The foreign lawyers I knew in China all had excellent Chinese that ran rings around most learners - probably from reading and interpreting all those Chinese laws by themselves.

[Aphorisme]

imron --> really? That's really strange, because I had two internships (one month each) in China, one in Shanghai and one in Beijing, in two big law firms and all the foreign lawyers that I met there couldn't speak chinese. I met two who could: one could speak very well but not properly read chinese law, and the other one could read chinese law but only the main laws, but couldn't easily read chinese legal database (academic commentaries as instance). Plus, this last one was one of the "boss" in this law firm because he has this skill of reading chinese law...and as I just said it was not that good, since he couldn't make his own researches in chinese legal database. And one of the two writer of the famous "ChinaLawBlog" admitted that his chinese was not good and that he really couldn't read chinese laws. His partner can, an he is the only one I heard of who can properly read every sort of legal documents. All this to say that, in my experience, the vast majority of foreign lawyers can't speak chinese.

 

But i would be curious to hear more from your own experience, which seems really different from mine.

[JustinJJ]

I met a young Chinese lady who worked at a German legal firm in Beijing. The head of the office (a German) spoke no Chinese and had been sent to China to head up the office. She told me that he would often send her text messages during meetings because he needed to ask her questions, having no idea what was going on.

 

The result: He was fired and returned to Germany and she became head of the office.

[Elizabeth_rb]

I'm not 100% convinced that Chinese gives a professional advantage.  OK, leave aside the fact that I've been involved in the teaching of Chinese at a UK university for the mo, as that obviously requires Chinese.  All the other work I've ever done has seen my Chinese language as nothing more than, 'Oh do you? How interesting.'  Ditto for my hubby.

 

In the UK, the only real opportunities for using Chinese professionally outside London (where there are some business jobs going, although many expect only Chinese nationals to apply as adverts frequently state 'Chinese native speaker with fluent English' etc) are Chinese teaching and translation/interpreting.  It seems that, most of the time, although a reported 40%+ of British companies expressed an interest in China and Chinese language skills a few years ago, they are more likely to seek those from a Chinese person with a UK Masters degree than a British person.  Things may have changed in the last couple of years, but I don't think they have very much.  Chinese language skills are still a small niche that will give very little professional advantage in the UK.  

 

Of course, the Chinese speaking world is going to be another matter and a good number of the students I taught who are now using their language skills in their careers are in China, Taiwan, Singapore HK, etc.  Many, I hasten to add, are not using their Chinese professionally.

 

Or does anyone else have anything more up to date/differing to add?

[Guest realmayo]

Chinese language skills are still a small niche

 

Perhaps because of that there's no point advertising for jobs that require it?

 

But I've certainly seen jobs saying things like: 

 

 

Additional language is desirable (e.g. German, French, Italian, and Chinese)

[Shelley]

When it comes to jobs and what employers are looking for, it doesn't matter sometimes what you got your degree in, getting a degree shows you have the sort of personality/intelligence that allows someone to pass exams and get a degree.

 

So adding Chinese to your CV isn't necessarily good because you will be able to use your Chinese, but good because it shows you can apply yourself to a task and are self motivated enough to see it through.

 

Passing exams and getting degrees is not always about the actual knowledge but more about the sort of person you are.

[Silent]

 

I'm not 100% convinced that Chinese gives a professional advantage.

The big question is advantage on what level? Sure, outside the Chinese language area Chinese is probably just a niche, unless you have a really China related job (translator, teacher, chinese culture/art/history related) few are interested in your skills. This of course does not mean it has no value. E.g.if you're able to search and read Chinese research papers this may very well help a R&D employee to get better/faster results.

 

In the Chinese language area, even if Chinese is not/barely considered when sending someone to China or hiring a laowai, for your performance in the job Chinese is beneficial. It helps in obtaining efficiently the info needed, it helps in getting a complete picture (no/less filtering and coloring due to a translator) and understand cultural issue's , it will in many cases help in creating goodwill and creating a usefull network.

 

Depending on the job and location I think knowing Chinese is mostly of limited interest for getting a job. For the performance in the job, specially in the Chinese language area, can be very handy. Turning Chinese language skills into monetary benefits is of course a different matter. Chinese language skills will often help you, but the skills you might have acquired in the time you spend learning Chinese might very well take you a lot further.

[imron]

But i would be curious to hear more from your own experience, which seems really different from mine.

Interviewed once at a foreign law firm in China.  The foreigner interviewing me had great Chinese, and I was told I'd need to be able to read Chinese laws.  I was offered the job, but ended up taking a different one more related to my background (computers and technology).  I also had a foreign friend who was a lawyer and who had excellent Chinese.  This is going back quite a few years now (6-7), so maybe the situation has changed.

 

admitted that his chinese was not good

I don't know about this guy, or the specifics of his Chinese, but often people with good Chinese will be modest about their own language abilities.  Especially if they've been living in China for a long time and certain cultural habits have rubbed off on them.

 

It's actually not so difficult to read Chinese law.  I did a semester of business classes in Chinese at Tsinghua and Chinese company law was one of the subjects.  It was far and away my favourite out of all the subjects (and the most interesting).

[Aphorisme]

Imron : i will make two remarks. 

 

First, it's pretty incredible to see that you have been offered a job in a law firm without having a background specifically related to law. In Europe you can't be hired in a law firm without having studied law for five years at least. That shows that your chinese is really good, but also that chinese legal market is really open. In Europe there is not way that something like that happens. 

 

Second, in my opinion reading chinese company law (公司法) is really hard. Even my chinese teacher and my chinese girlfriend can't read it and understand it. Long sentences, tricky grammar (but I admit that once you've got it, it's okay), and above all, complex vocabulary (新股认购优先权 is a technical word). If you are not comfortable with your own legal system, you will be totally lost; if your are comfortable with your own legal system, you will still face tricky issues of translation (can you really translate 抵押 by mortgage, as these two words don't really refer exactly to the same legal mechanism?). All this to say that, before reading your post, I couldn't imagine that someone had ever found chinese company law easy to read. And i've been studying law at the university for four years, specially business law, so i thought that my opinion was pretty relevant. Plus, the legal system of my country is a civil law based system (大陆法系)...the same legal system that China's one, which should make the understanding of chinese law easier for me. If you were talking about contract law (合同法), I wouldn't have been surprised; but describing company law as easy to read, that is really surprising for me

 

P.S: sorry for my poor english, I haven't spoken english for ages, and I've never been good at learning languages.

[JustinJJ]

Perhaps Imron wasn't interviewing for a job as a lawyer.

[imron]

First, it's pretty incredible to see that you have been offered a job in a law firm without having a background specifically related to law.

I forget the specifics of the job on offer (it was 7-8 years ago now), but it wasn't as a lawyer and wasn't client facing. 

 

 

 

Even my chinese teacher and my chinese girlfriend can't read it and understand it.

There are specialist terms e.g. 法人 which has nothing to do with 人, and precise meanings of words that are maybe not so precise when used by laymen e.g. whether terms like 5以上 or 10以下 include the numbers 5 and 10 or not (if memory serves me correct, from a company law point of view they do, but if you ask 10 ordinary people you'll get a bunch of mixed answers).

 

Once you've got your head around that, reading of the laws themselves is fairly straightforward.  Here's a sample:

 

　　第二十三条　设立有限责任公司，应当具备下列条件：

　　（一）股东符合法定人数；

　　（二）股东出资达到法定资本最低限额；

　　（三）股东共同制定公司章程；

　　（四）有公司名称，建立符合有限责任公司要求的组织机构；

　　（五）有公司住所。

 

and another:

 

第二十六条　有限责任公司的注册资本为在公司登记机关登记的全体股东认缴的出资额。公司全体股东的首次出资额不得低于注册资本的百分之二十，也不得低于法定的注册资本最低限额，其余部分由股东自公司成立之日起两年内缴足；其中，投资公司可以在五年内缴足。

　　有限责任公司注册资本的最低限额为人民币三万元。法律、行政法规对有限责任公司注册资本的最低限额有较高规定的，从其规定。

 

Actually, in some ways, reading of laws is far easier than a newspaper or novel because it contains many small self contained units of meaning, typically only a handful of sentences long.

[gato]

The vocabulary is more limited (though somewhat technical in nature), no use of colorful adjectives, no chengyus, more repetition of phrases.

[Silent]

 

Actually, in some ways, reading of laws is far easier than a newspaper or novel because it contains many small self contained units of meaning, typically only a handful of sentences long.

Don't know about Chinese law, but I think in most languages despite specific vocabulary is used, the reading itself of the law is not the big issue. The real issue is knowing what it implies. The meaning of certain words may in a legal context be (somewhat) different from what the dictionary says. Higher courts may have spoken verdicts that change the interpretation of a law to something that's counter intuitive from a linguistical point of view. Intentions of the lawmaker may be taken into account in interpreting the law etc.

[roddy]

On the value of writing, I got forwarded a job description for an editor at the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, working specifically on translations of Qiushi, which is Party Central's theory journal. Here's a quote from 'requirements':

"Full professional proficiency in Chinese (listening, speaking, and reading);"

[丹尼尔]

I tend to agree with marsblackman. Recently also took part in the hsk 6 computer test (waiting for results) and found the input method kind of annoying as you could only type character by character. .the writing part was a muck up as a result and I can imagine some students writing faster by hand.

I personally enjoy handwriting but often forget parts of a character especially if I am stressed, like when writing an exam. If I were to take the 6 again I would make an effort to do the hand written version and think it would help me to internalise the characters.

for me it really comes down to two factors; how much time do you have to invest and what do you want to do with written chinese.

[samosaman]

First off, one needs to be clear that Chinese has an added discipline in handwriting characters; if you compare to learning English as a foreign language for example. Therefore, if you are keen on mastering all aspects of Chinese, handwriting is definitely a must. However, it is a big task as you need to practice/use your characters on a constant basis to keep them up to speed. As a matter of fact, even Chinese natives forget characters if they do not use them much or for prolonged periods of time.

 

Chinese are a pragmatic people and it is one of the main goals of Hanban and the Confucius Institute to get more people to take the HSK. It seems as if the handwriting part has been, by popular demand, ostracized resulting in computer based input testing methods being made available. The point is you should not learn a language for the purpose of taking a test but for the purpose of enhancing yourself as a human being. Be clear on what you want out of it, and if learning handwriting will help you with it do it. If it does not, don't. To say that the HSK computer based exam has no value seems a it extreme, though.

 

I myself am a big fan of a learning method that separates handwriting from the other disciplines, I studied in this manner at the Sinology Institute in Beijing. I started off learning all but handwriting and added calligraphy classes later on after I got very familiar with the characters etc. I can write about several hundred from the top of my head now, but this number keeps receding as I have little chance of using them. Shamo.

[abcdefg]

#77

 

The point is you should not learn a language for the purpose of taking a test but for the purpose of enhancing yourself as a human being.

 

This may be true for you, but for me the purpose of learning a new language is to be able to communicate with native speakers when I'm on their turf.

[Elizabeth_rb]

abcdef: I expect that's what they meant.

[ZhangKaiRong]

@zhouhaochen

 

I guess we are talking about very different scenarios. I'm not aware of any statistics on professionals (excluding ESL teachers) going to China which can tell us more about which route did they take (expat or finding a job on the spot), however, having a quite good overview of the nature of my profession (MNC/consulting/finance), I guess that most of them end up in China as expats. For most foreigners, the expat route is the one and only beneficial way to go to China and work there, and in this case your command of Mandarin is 100% irrelevant - as you stated as well. This has three logical reasons:

- generous expat packages (in case of the consulting, I heard that junior manager salaries are starting from 40k RMB per month, and in most cases it also includes an apartment paid by the company or plus money for housing issues)

- no risk of unpleaseant surprise - you are hired to do the same job in a different environment, corporate culture is more or less the same

- you leave a door open behind you, so if you end up hating China, you can get back easily to your home country

 

What you said might be true, I never tried to get a job in Beijing when I was in China. But I also doubt that after gaining some years of valuable financial consulting experience I would have to balls to first resign at my current workplace, go to China and trust my luck for getting a suitable professional job and not getting tremendous boring English teaching offers. It's like science fiction for me, and it might be the case with most 老外 professionals seeking to get a job in China. There is a high risk that you could end up with a less sexy salary package, or get hired for a job which is not the one you were actually looking for. And don't forget the power of guanxi, which you obviously don't have at that time. Getting headhunted from China on the web (linkedin) is also highly unlikely if you are currently not working in London, New York, Melbourne, or any other big financial centres of the world.

This is why I insist on my original statement that getting a job for a foreigner who is not located in China is unrelated to his Chinese proficiency. Obviously, after getting the chance to go to China, your actual language skills can be invaluable, however, it is not a requirement in most relevant companies operating in China. 

 

@realmayo

 

At advantage, I mean a thing that can make your relocation happen in a shorter time. If you want to apply individually, please see my above reply why I consider it highly unlikely. For the expat position scenario, let's assume your company has positions to fill in China, and it is open for everyone who get promoted to a certain position at their home country. Person A has been working at the company for 6 years, he is considered to be a good labour, a manager, he is experienced but he speaks no Chinese. People B has been working for the company for 4 years, he is also considered to be a good labour, he can speak fluent Chinese, he is an experienced one, but just a senior expert. Although it seems logical to appoint Person B to be the one who can go, because the marginal experience is far less useful than the language knowledge, the company will still appoints Person A to go, since he is more experienced. This kind of expat relocation matters are handled really really bad in Europe, and this is what makes most 老外s in China look ridiculous and dumb.

Of course, if Person A and B have exactly the same backgrounds, experience and reputation - except the Chinese skills -, the decision for relocation might differ. However, I can hardly imagine this kind of scenario could exist. While you are busy maintaining or developing your Chinese skills, others can work on some additional professional qualifications, which in the end make him more valuable than you.