The structure of the new HSK Exam

[deen the breen]

hi peepz

I am studying Chinese at my school and I want to take an HSK exam soon. There seem to be different versions of HSK; the old HSK and the new HSK. I am wondering if someone can tell me about the structure of the new HSK. What about speaking and written parts? difficulty levels, question types, etc. will be most grateful for some help.

deen

[linguaholic]

Hi deen

I have been taking several of the new HSK exams. I think I can answer some of your questions. I will share my experience 

First of all, it is important to know that the exam is split up in two parts: Oral exam and a written exam. It is possible to just register and enroll for one of them. In my case, I just did the written exam (as many of my friends as well). The written HSK exam has the following parts/sections:

Chinese HSK / Listening Part

You will hear people speaking about a certain topic (1 person or discussion) and then you will need to answer multiple choice questions about it. First part are pretty short speeches/discussions and then at the end there are also some kind of stories that you will need to listen to and then answer several questions about it.

Chinese HSK / Writing Part

Until HSK 4 you will really need to write your own texts. You will just have to put sentences in the correct order and rewrite them. You will have something like this here: Zhu rui shi zai wo (the correct answer here would be wo zhu zai ruishi). In HSK Level 5 and 6, you will need to write two short texts. The first text will be about a given topic and some given words that you will need to implement in the text. The second thext will be based about a picture. In the second part you are completely free about the choice of vocabulary and so on. (requires a pretty good knowledge of writing, vocabulary, etc) Each text must be about 80 characters long, so that’s not too bad I reckon. Or was it 80 words ? I guess it was characters :=)

Chinese HSK / Speaking Part

There is not much that I can tell you about the speaking part. As mentioned above, this part is hold in a separate exam. I don't know a single person who did the oral exam of the new HSK. Hope some other members will be able to tell you about it.

Chinese HSK / Reading Part

You will get many different texts that you will need to read through and then answer multiple choice questions. Similar as in speaking, the content is rather short at the beginning and then it gets longer and longer. Time pressure here is a big problem, as it is (at least for me it was) almost impossible to read every sentence of every text (because the time is too short!)

Hopefully that answered some of your questions deen 

 

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