Why do many students give up learning Chinese around the HSK4 level?

[amytheorangutan]

I stopped studying the HSK books after HSK4 but I continue studying and having private lessons using other resources. My personal opinion about why people stop at HSK4 based on my own experience:

 

- HSK books are not the best materials, it’s boring, have weird topics and the gap between HSK 4 and 5 is too big that most people would not be able to catch up in class unless they do unrealistically tons of work outside the class. Especially for people who also have jobs outside of studying Chinese.

 

- By the time you are at HSK 4 level your Chinese level is good enough and you’ve been studying it long enough that you know what you want to use your Chinese for, what type of conversation you’d like to have with other people, what kind of native materials you’d like to consume and HSK5 vocabularies probably don’t support your interests. 

- I have a feeling not everyone who stops studying the HSK stops studying Chinese altogether. They probably just change method of study and material. Taking myself as an example, my previous Chinese class provider probably thinks that 8 of us have given up Chinese because we didn’t continue to their HSK5 class but I actually just changed to private teacher and I know that 4-5 others in the class do the same thing. 
 

- If you study in a group class HSK4 is about as high as you can get before you realise you are not gaining anything from the class because you need a lot more one on one interaction to improve. 

[Guest realmayo]

On 4/3/2022 at 8:53 AM, amytheorangutan said:

I stopped studying the HSK books after HSK4

 

I've just thought: do most classes uses HSK textbooks as their principal textbooks these days? I'm wondering whether teachers assume students only want to study towards the HSK, and students assume that teachers think studying towards the HSK is the most efficient path. But perhaps neither of these things are true in many/most cases?

[amytheorangutan]

@realmayoI definitely find most group classes use HSK books as their principal textbooks. Probably because they think most people would want to take the HSK test at some point either as a requirement for further study or work or just a way to mark their personal progress. The books are fine for the first 3 or 4 because most of us when we started from zero it's almost doesn't matter what book we use as long as it's not too awfully outdated but once you get to intermediate/upper intermediate that's when you notice how ineffective, boring and irrelevant the HSK books are.

[Guest]

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[jaapgrolleman]

After HSK4, I choose to continue with 发展汉语 books instead of HSK5 and it's the best decision I made. HSK5 is pretty much written Chinese so yeah, as so comments here said also, it won't make you that much better at speaking.