I wanted to check if there is anyone here who has some experience with taking the HSK,. I’ve been thinking about taking it myself in the coming months and it would be nice to hear from others what they think about it.
Around 10 years ago I took the somewhat equivalent JLPT in japanese and found that it was a good motivator to have some concrete goal with my studying. Also, I’m working quite a lot in China and with Chinese colleagues so I’m thinking it might be useful to get my Chinese skills certified.
Right now my impression from looking at some sample exams is that I am currently somewhere between HSK level 5 and 6. Although level 6’s vocabulary list only contains about 5000 words, from what I can tell from importing the HSK vocabulary lists into Lingq, they are hardly the top 5000 most frequently used words. Since I started on Lingq, according to my statistics, I’ve read about half a million words from various sources, but still have close to 600 unseen words in the level 6 vocabulary list, so it feels like in order to actually get there naturally the actual number is quite much higher. Also, the actual tests seem to contain quite a few words not on the list, so just cramming the words on the list might not be sufficient to passing the tests.
What do you guys think? Have you taken the HSK and did your experience match my impression? Did you have any use of having taken the test?