Should I learn ALL hsk 6 words in order to pass HSK 6?

[brigitte]

Hey guys,

 

I've been studying mandarin for 4 years, I'm now living in china and speak/read chinese on a daily basis. I'm also doing my bachelor here.  

I'm still far away of the level I want to get, but I always thought I was kind of "decent" at mandarin. Since I do understand most of my classes, and can read newspaper (still a difficult thing as I read very slowly and may not understand 100% of all words but I get a grasp of it). Recently I picked up on some books to improve (started with 活著 and now reading 許三觀賣血記）my reading. 

Anyway until now I've never really bothered to learn HSK words. I just learn words that I encounter in life (might it be chatting with friends, reading something or classes). So I know a bunch of words that are not even in the HSK. But I've hard time determining my level, and I need to pass hsk 6 in few months. My surprise when I discovered that I only knew 35% of them.... So 1600 left (according to chinese text analyser with my anki deck, so there are words that I may know, but definitly around 1300 unknow for sure). 

I took a view at HSK 6 test.I don't think I could pass it now. But it may not be a lack of vocabulary, morever I'm not used to that kind of test, (for exemple the part where you need to find grammatical error, most of the time i have no clue) and second my reading speed is very slow (but i'm working on it).

 

I usually heavily rely on SRS for vocabulary learning. I learn every word by learning by heart a senteance with this word. And I have two cards (recognition and recall). I know that it might seems too much for some, but it really sticks in my memory that way. 

 

Should I learn all HSK 6 words in order to pass the HSK 6 - and get good grade - ? 

[anonymoose]

As far as I know, vocabulary in the HSK 6 is not limited by any official vocabulary list, so from that point of view, even knowing the whole list will not guarantee you know everything that might turn up in the exam. On the other hand, the HSK vocabulary list probably contains many useful words that would be worth knowing anyway. Perhaps you could just go through the list and learn the ones that seem common or useful to you, and skip over the more obscure or useless words. Doing a lot of your own reading will definitely help. Having said that, the HSK reading as far as I recall usually consists of modern prose rather than literature, so you may be better off reading things like 读者 or newspapers for vocabulary and content that is closer to what you might encounter in the HSK.

 

At the same time, you need to identify your week areas and work on them all. If you are having difficulty with the grammatical error questions, then it would be a good idea to purchase an exercise book containing this kind of question (preferably with explanations) and work through that, and you could simultaneously learn the new vocabulary you encounter with this.

 

[Jan Finster]

From what you write it is not clear why you need to pass HSK 6. Is it a job-related matter? If you do not have to pass it, why bother?

 

I am not studying for HSK, but I have read quite a lot of Chinese in the last 12 months. Last week I checked my statistics with Lingq and Chinese Text Analyzer: I have read about half a million characters, some 18000 unique words and about 3600 unique characters. Nevertheless, when I cross-checked it against all words from HSK 1-6, I only encountered around 65% of them. In other words, HSK 6 vocabulary is super obscure. And there is a reason for it. They want to test if you know a very wide range of words. I would imagine even if you read something like 5 million characters from different sources, you are not guaranteed to encounter all words from HSK 1-6. This means, the best "hack" to learn HSK 6 vocabulary is probably to study the HSK 6 list with Anki or the like.  If you go by the natural exposure route, it will take much longer.

 

[roddy]

I'd be a little more cautious. If you look at those 35% of HSK6 words you don't know, what are they and where do they rank for overall frequency in the language? Is the material you're reading a factor - glancing over the list I can see stuff like 整顿, which you'll find plenty in political / news documents, but rarely in a romance novel, or 招标, which is a common term - in business contexts. They might just be obscure for you, and half a million characters - while excellent! - is 4-5 novels, which isn't a lot of language overall.

 

I think I remember reading that the HSK exams don't stick to their wordlists, so going beyond them is a grand idea for many reasons. But HSK1-6 is a total of only 5,000 words, and I doubt many genuinely obscure words made it in there.

 

For the OP - it sounds like you're pretty serious about your Chinese. If you're taking the HSK6 anyway, then making sure you've got the vocab learned seems to make sense. But as you say, it's not just the vocab you need.

[imron]

Probably the biggest problem for you will be reading speed.  Increasing your vocabulary will help increase this somewhat (nothing slows you down like not knowing a word), however a lot of it is also down to how much reading of long-form content you have done.  I wrote about one way you can try to improve your reading speed here.  You should probably be aiming for 200-250 characters per minute if you want to be able to read everything and still have time to answer.

 

 

[Tomsima]

1 hour ago, Jan Finster said:

HSK 6 vocabulary is super obscure

 

This is an opinion worth reassessing. HSK 6 vocab covers a little bit of vocab from a wide range of subjects. Some of those subjects may be less familiar to you personally, but to the average Chinese person the hsk 6 wordlist is a list of fairly common words. I think you'd want to do the list first, then follow your own interests to add a further 2000-3000 vocab items before you could sit the 6 exam without breaking a sweat. As you may have seen, there is often an argument that the 6 exam is still too easy and advanced students want a higher level exam like the old hsk 6.

 

Also, as Imron has said, reading speed is an important skill anyway, but is crucial to exam technique - regardless of your comprehension abilities, if you cant finish reading the articles you won't be able to answer the questions. For a similar reason, if you can take a paper exam then do, from my experience speed reading characters displayed in a terrible font on a bad computer monitor can also be detrimental to your performance.

 

As you can see, sometimes your Chinese level is not as important as exam technique.

[roddy]

There's an interesting piece here (pdf) on English vocab at the CEFR levels. For what it's worth, that talks about a B2 level having 4,700 headwords, roughly equivalent to the 5,000 in the full HSK range. That tallies with non-Hanban assessments (see "Estimates of CEFR equivalents" chart) of HSK6 as equivalent to a B2 level. Which is upper-intermediate. 

[大块头]

from a similar thread:

 

Quote

@hskalan did some interesting analysis of this topic.

 

Here is a comparison of the HSK word list with the SUBTLEX-CH word frequency list. Here are some other pretty graphs.

 

[Jan Finster]

2 hours ago, roddy said:

I'd be a little more cautious. If you look at those 35% of HSK6 words you don't know, what are they and where do they rank for overall frequency in the language? Is the material you're reading a factor - glancing over the list I can see stuff like 整顿, which you'll find plenty in political / news documents, but rarely in a romance novel, or 招标, which is a common term - in business contexts. They might just be obscure for you, and half a million characters - while excellent! - is 4-5 novels, which isn't a lot of language overall.

 

2 hours ago, Tomsima said:

This is an opinion worth reassessing. HSK 6 vocab covers a little bit of vocab from a wide range of subjects. Some of those subjects may be less familiar to you personally, but to the average Chinese person the hsk 6 wordlist is a list of fairly common words. I think you'd want to do the list first, then follow your own interests to add a further 2000-3000 vocab items before you could sit the 6 exam without breaking a sweat. As you may have seen, there is often an argument that the 6 exam is still too easy and advanced students want a higher level exam like the old hsk 6.

 

Yes, this is probably true. I could probably read a crime or spy novel without a dictionary by now, but I am "a bit" short on business Chinese ?

 

This gets me back to the discussion I had with Imron the other day, if 5000 words really get you halfway. 18000 unique words (read - not knowing) and only 65% of HSK makes me wonder again. Here is the thread:

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/57821-improving-grammar-vocab-translations-suggestions/?do=findComment&comment=466013

 

It would be interesting to compile a list of topics,  which you should read in order to be exposed to all HSK 6 vocabulary. Anyone got any suggestions?

 

 

 

 

[Ruky]

I'm preparing  for  the exam  too.  Im  using  HSK standard  course text  book  to  learn  most  of  the  vocabulary  on  the  list.   Each chapter has  50 HSK words.  You  can also get  vocabulary  from   practice  exam  papers.  For  section  two  on  the  reading part you will need  to  know  the  usage /collocations  of  the  words.   

[roddy]

@brigitte - what did you decide to do?