HSK online pinyin system

[月色108]

Greetings all! First post, but I've read a few threads here over the last year while I was studying.

 

I took the HSK 3 yesterday, however, the pinyin system was abhorrent. I wasted 5 minutes just figuring out how to use it. The test proctor didn't even know how to use it. It very clearly malfunctioned as the proctor was unable to get a specific character to appear (It eventually worked after fiddling with settings). Luckily, I finally figured it out enough to get the exam done. It was a bit of a nightmare. I'm fairly sure I passed, I had nearly perfect scores on listening & reading -- woohoo! -- but my writing was abysmal. Normally on practice exams I always did way better at writing and struggled most with listening (I can handwrite all 600 words from pinyin). This was very disturbing to me.

 

Here is my question:

Is there a way I can practice the official HSK pinyin computer system for online tests? I plan to take HSK 4 and want to make sure I am very proficient with it. I am very good with Android pinyin keyboard and Microsoft Windows pinyin keyboard.

 

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Jellyfish]

Hey, I had the same issues as you with HSK3 - writing the 5 characters was easy enough but I had issues with the sentence construction part. My teacher told me that interpunctuation counts towards having actually successfully constructed a sentence or not, although it's not given in the "assemble the parts" section. And sure enough, after she'd pointed that out to me I saw that all the correct solutions in past papers had a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark. So in the exam I added full stops etc which promptly gave me what I think was a red error message. It was all in Chinese and I panicked and didn't even try to read it but I'm assuming it meant that I'm using too many characters (i.e. we've only given you 8 characters, you're using 9 or something like that). I tried to ask the teacher who was present at the test (unfortunately not the one who told me to add interpunctuation) what to do - I was told to add full stops etc but the system didn't seem to like it. The teacher told me she didn't know either and she said the red message was ok and nothing to worry about, so I just went with the interpunctuation.

I scored pretty badly in that section (70-odd when my other sections were 98 and 100). I'm 100% sure the characters were correct so I must've lost points in the sentence construction. I'm pretty sure I also messed up one sentence, possibly two, but I'm still at a loss as to how it works with the interpunctuation. Does anyone here know?

[月色108]

Our scores were very close too! I got 98 and 100 also (listening & reading, respectively), but only got 52 on the writing part. I know I got at least one sentence correct (the first one is always easy), and I think I got the 2nd or 3rd one too, but not certain. I'm absolutely certain I got all 5 characters though.

 

I read elsewhere that I might have been able to "drag-n-drop" the words from the sentence to arrange them. I just want to be prepared for HSK 4... I want to be able to practice their pinyin typing system so I can be quicker...

[mungouk]

Bumping this thread as I'm planning to take HSK 3 in July and want to know how the input method works.  Thanks!

 

[Balthazar]

I've heard it's up to each centre to decide for itself so there may be different systems in use. I took the HSK 4 quite recently (in China), the centre used Sogou (worked flawlessly)

[mungouk]

12 hours ago, Balthazar said:

the centre used Sogou

 

Ah that's very useful to know, thanks.  I'll see if I can install it on my Mac so I can practice.

 

 

[laomao]

I think the centre I did my exam at also used Sogou. I don't use sogou at work or at home but didn't find any problems with it.

[mungouk]

Thanks @laomao — which test centre in Shanghai did you use?  I might also do the test in Shanghai.

[laomao]

2 minutes ago, mungouk said:

which test centre in Shanghai did you use?

It was very close to 徐家汇 station, on 漕溪北路. I did HSK3 in Shanghai too, but the paper based one - that was in 静安.