HSK 3.0 ... new, new HSK?

[albert s]

You're certainly much more informed than me, which is why this forum is so cool! Mine was just a quick guess lol. No prob!

[roddy]

Stay around, @albert s! Are you planning to take the HSK soon?

[albert s]

Yeah @roddy I’m planning on taking HSK5 in not too long, hopefully I can start with HSK6 vocab around august/ september!

[Guest]

Erase personal profile and all posts.

[叫我小山]

I can’t wait until someone makes an Anki deck with the new vocabulary, as I am too lazy to!

[Jan Finster]

2 hours ago, 叫我小山 said:

with the new vocabulary,

 

Is the new list already published? Would be intersting to see how much overlap there is between HSK 2.0 and HSK 3.0. vocabulary.

[大块头]

26 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

Is the new list already published?

 

No, all we know right now is that it will be primarily based on the 2010 book《 汉语国际教育用音节汉字词汇等级划分》.

[Weyland]

I wonder if we could have some kind of crowd-sourced effort to map the road from start to fluency. Many people on this forum (and beyond) have provided us with lists of resources and the tools to approximate the level of said resources, yet we what we really lack is a roadmap (with resources acting as way-points).

[Jan Finster]

2 hours ago, Weyland said:

I wonder if we could have some kind of crowd-sourced effort to map the road from start to fluency. Many people on this forum (and beyond) have provided us with lists of resources and the tools to approximate the level of said resources, yet we what we really lack is a roadmap (with resources acting as way-points).

 

I guess as soon as the new HSK is officially published a whole industry will jump on that wagon. Currently there are literally thousands of books and websites on the old HSK. I could not imagine it to be any different with HSK 3.0.

 

I wonder how often such language learning norms change in other languages (?) Does, for instance, the TOEFL get modified every 10 years or so?   

[大块头]

15 hours ago, Weyland said:

what we really lack is a roadmap (with resources acting as way-points)

 

I like using talent trees to model the process of learning a new skill.

[7800]

So, there's this reddit post from last month. Has anyone here seen it? OP seems to have scanned a part of that book that's supposed to serve as a basis of the new HSK, and there's a short discussion about the book and the vocabulary list.

[大块头]

I think you will find a lot more information in this thread about the HSK 3.0 than you will in that Reddit post 

[7800]

@大块头 did I miss something and someone already posted a word list here?

[Demonic_Duck]

I gotta be honest, the fact they're basing the whole thing on this book 《 汉语国际教育用音节汉字词汇等级划分》 seems super weird. Perhaps thanks to a lobbying campaign by/on behalf of the author?

 

Treating syllables as a unit of language proficiency (rather than a unit of sounds/morphemes) is not something I've ever seen used before and doesn't seem to make much sense. Imagine you're designing a curriculum for a given proficiency level, and you've already fulfilled your quota for syllables. Do you reject new syllables but accept new characters that happen to reuse existing ones? “We don't have room for 明确, because we don't have any other què syllables, so let's add 中毒 instead, because we already have 阅读 and 重要”. Under what pedagogical theory is that a sensible criterion for inclusion?

 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, and the number of syllables listed per level is simply an artifact that didn't affect inclusion criteria... but in that case, why list it at all? And why does all the publicity material released so far keep mentioning 音节 at every opportunity?

[imron]

I guess it's descriptive rather than prescriptive?  i.e. they added it to provide information about the word lists, rather than used it to define the level and then tried to match it.

[roddy]

I'm really not sure what's going on with 音节. You'd expect them to be starting with vocab and then providing character and syllable info based on that. BUT if you look at the numbers, all the characters are nice round numbers and the others aren't. Which suggests that either they've started with characters and then decided what vocab items that lets them include, OR they've done it the sensible way and then... no, that doesn't make sense. I don't know how they've done that. 

 

But it sounds to me like they plan to *test* syllables somehow: 

确定音节、汉字、词汇、语法的四维语言量化指标体系

不仅增加了音节、汉字的项目要求

 

So at a guess I'd imagine some kind of abstract quantified pronunciation test? Can you say 妈？ What about 麻？ Ok, 马? Etc. Rather than taking a more holistic view based on a speaking test. But I really have no idea. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if they have a sitting of the new exam next week, or it disappears and we never hear of it again. 

 

[Weyland]

 One thing is for certain: he re-organization will leave a lot of people wondering what their HSK3.0 level is.

 

[Demonic_Duck]

13 hours ago, roddy said:

they've started with characters and then decided what vocab items that lets them include

I mean, that would make a lot more sense than syllables... but also a lot less sense than words.

 

13 hours ago, roddy said:

So at a guess I'd imagine some kind of abstract quantified pronunciation test? Can you say 妈？ What about 麻？ Ok, 马? Etc. Rather than taking a more holistic view based on a speaking test

That suggests there will at least be some spoken component to the HSK-proper, it'll no longer be confined purely to HSKK. Though if that's all it is, it'll be pretty limited. I suppose it's a lot easier to grade than a proper speaking test, though...

 

13 hours ago, roddy said:

At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if they have a sitting of the new exam next week, or it disappears and we never hear of it again.

True. Idle speculation is fun, though!

 

And speaking of idle speculation... one other thing that's very intriguing about the syllable thing - the (speculative) vocab list linked in this Reddit thread mentions "stress levels" of light, medium, and heavy, which seem to be only tangentially related to the conventional 轻声. For example, 有的是 and 比如说 are both listed as medium-light-heavy, despite being pinyinized as yoǔdeshì and bǐrúshuō, respectively.

 

Looking at the patterns, there does seem to be some truth to many of them... for example, 为什么 as heavy-light-light makes a lot of sense, given that it's often pronounced in a way that could plausibly be pinyinized as "weì-rm". But it's a pretty subtle point, and not something I've seen explicitly taught before. Certainly not something likely to hinder understanding if you failed to replicate it in your own speech.

[艾墨本]

3 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

 

And speaking of idle speculation... one other thing that's very intriguing about the syllable thing - the (speculative) vocab list linked in this Reddit thread mentions "stress levels" of light, medium, and heavy, which seem to be only tangentially related to the conventional 轻声. For example, 有的是 and 比如说 are both listed as medium-light-heavy, despite being pinyinized as yoǔdeshì and bǐrúshuō, respectively.

 

Looking at the patterns, there does seem to be some truth to many of them... for example, 为什么 as heavy-light-light makes a lot of sense, given that it's often pronounced in a way that could plausibly be pinyinized as "weì-rm". But it's a pretty subtle point, and not something I've seen explicitly taught before. Certainly not something likely to hinder understanding if you failed to replicate it in your own speech.

Im happy this knowledge is making it into the HSK. This information is well established and used in textbooks that revolve around 播音员 and 普通话水平测试.

 

Personally, knowing that this existed helped me with my pronunciation and hearing a lot because I was previously trying to fork things into boxes that don’t accurately represent the stress levels of words. This resulted in a lack of clarity because it wasn’t really either of the known options.

 

The question then becomes WHEN is teaching this level of precision appropriate? 
 

Kind of like how you rarely see neutral tones separated into several categories depending on the preceding tone or the avoidance of explaining the complexity of multiple third tones in a row and simplifying it to just turning the first of the two into second tone.

[Demonic_Duck]

 

16 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

This information is well established and used in textbooks [...]

 

Edit: Split discussion to this thread: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/60246-light-medium-heavy-stress-and-other-pronunciation-subtleties/