Preparing for HSK4

Around 5 years ago I took the HSK 3 test. To prepare for it I used the book Preparation for the HSK exam by Huang and Ziethen together with some HSK mock-up exams I found online. While I reached a decent score I felt my Chinese didn’t improve that much. Therefore I spent the last few years focusing on speaking the language by taking private lessons. For a while, I was thinking about taking the HSK 4, and with the HSK system being replaced by a new 9-level system soon I figured that it was time to take the exam. While passing HSK 3 was still doable with some practice HSK 4 requires more time and planning to pass, especially since 600 new words have to be learned. Therefore I’m writing this article to have an overview of what I have to learn in order to pass the exam while also monitoring my progress at the same time.​

Besides that, I wanted to challenge myself and mostly rely on resources that can be found online and if possible are free of charge. Therefore I did some research and collected all relevant information regarding the HSK 4 test together with resources that should cover all important aspects of the test. I also created some resources myself when I wasn’t happy with the free available options I found online.

During my preparation I tried to keep track of which topics I had studied. I will talka little bit about my progress at the end of the article to give you an orientation on how I prepared for the exam and what I might have done differently with the knowledge that I have now.

With all the preliminary information out of the way let’s dive into the structure of the HSK 4 in the next section to get an overview of what you have to learn in order to pass the exam.

Structure of the HSK 4 exam

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The HSK4 exam is split into three sections namely listening, reading, and writing comprehension. The written test takes about 105 minutes where 5 minutes are given for you to fill out your personal information. You can reach 100 points per section amounting to 300 points in total. In order to pass the exam, 180 or more points are needed.

The listening section consists of 45 questions and takes 30 minutes. It is important to note that starting from HSK 4 the audio clips are only played once. Part one has 10 questions that are a monologue followed by a question. You then have to decide whether the statement is right or wrong. The second part has 15 questions of dialogues between two people. Then a third voice asks questions. Four options are presented where you have to pick the most likely answer to the proposed question. The last part has 20 questions where a longer dialogue or monolog is presented followed by questions. Same as in the last part you have to choose the most likely among four answers.

Next up is the reading section which consists of 40 questions and takes 40 minutes. The first part has 10 questions. On top, a few words are presented that are enumerated by letters. Below are sentences with gaps. You have to fill the gaps with the letters of the appropriate words. The second part has 10 questions where three parts of a sentence enumerated with letters are scrambled up. You have to rearrange the parts by writing the letters in the right order. The third part has 20 questions. A few sentences are followed by a question. Among four possible answers, you have to choose the most likely one.

The last section is writing. It is the shortest part with only 15 questions and 25 minutes assigned to this section. Part one has 10 questions where you have to construct sentences out of the presented words. The last part has 5 questions. Each question consists of a picture and a word. You have to describe the picture using the word.

Outline of the HSK 4

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The HSK 4 level covers about 1200 words and about 1500 characters. Furthermore, around 120 grammar patterns need to be learned. Managing to study all these aspects requires a study plan and the right resources. In the following, I will break down the different aspects and provide resources that should help you to prepare for the exam. While I collected some resources that I found most helpful, feel free to also use a book or other resources as additional learning material.

Vocabulary

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Part of reading and listening/understanding chinese is the vocabulary. The HSK 4 level consists of a combined amount of 600 words of the previous three levels and 600 new words for the fourth level making it 1200 words to remember.

Anki

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Probably the most efficient way is to use an app with spaced repetition. Spaced repetition presents the vocabulary again to the user once the vocabulary is about to be forgotten making it more likely to move the vocabulary from the short-term memory over into the long-term memory. A great free app is Anki, which is a flashcards app that allows importing user-made flashcard decks.

I found two Anki decks with the new 600 words of the HSK 4 level. The first deck simply offers the hanzi and pinyin as the question and the English translation as the answer. The second deck is a little more sophisticated and offers Spanish and English translations and audio.

Quizlet

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Alternatively, there is the app Quizlet that also allows importing user-made content. The difference is that it allows playing a memory game where you have to match question and answer as well as the ability to type the translation.

Custom HSK 1-4 Anki package

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In addition, I created a custom Anki package containing the fields hanzi, pinyin, hanzi compounds, and an example sentence. I actually created three packages, the first showing the hanzi and asking for the pronunciation and translation, the second one showing the translation and asking for the Chinese characters and pronunciation, and lastly a package containing both directions. The packages can be downloaded below. For now, the card templates are really simple but they might change in the future. Also keep in mind that I generated the compounds and example sentences therefore the quality of them might vary and could even contain mistakes. In case you encounter any mistakes or oddities you can contact me and I will try to improve the Anki packages.

You can pick the Anki package that fit your needs best. I personally will stick with the hsk1-4cn.apkg when preparing for the exam since I’m going to practice the other direction with the writer application in the Writing section below.

For this section, I decided not to use a progress indicator since it would be tedious to check off all 1200 words. Besides, Anki already tracks your progress therefore I didn’t see the need to track it in two different places.

Reading

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Learning vocabulary is one thing, but translating a whole sentence can be challenging. Seeing a big text block full of Chinese characters can be intimidating but the more you read the more confidence you’ll get. Therefore it is important to practice reading while you are still learning the vocabulary. However, finding a text that fits your level is hard. Texts might be either too easy or too difficult and might even include vocabulary outside of the HSK vocabulary. Thus I looked for texts that are labeled to be suitable for HSK 4 students. There were two websites that generally label their texts and with a combined amount of 38 stories from both websites you should have enough reading material to get started.

HSK Reading

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The website HSK Reading offers 27 short stories at the HSK 4 level that include a translation that is initially hidden together with a few questions testing your understanding of the text. Some of the articles even include an audio track of the text by a native speaker.

Chinese Reading Practice

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The website Chinese reading practice offers a longer and a bit more difficult set of texts. Most articles give a short introduction to the topic of that article. It is followed up by a list of difficult words and some tough grammatical patterns. The texts are hanzi only but pinyin can be enabled if you please as well as the English translation. There are 8 articles labeled as HSK 3-4, 2 articles labeled as HSK 4, and 5 articles labeled as HSK 4-5 however there are a couple of more articles without any labels, so you need to see if the articles fit your level. You can use this web application to analyze the HSK level of a Chinese text. The web application is free now but that might change in the future according to the website.

Listening

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When looking for HSK4 listening a multitude of videos are going to pop up. To have a clear focused article I, therefore, restricted myself to one channel that is described below. For me, it was important that the videos use resources that are close to the HSK preparation materials. If you are curious or the videos below are not enough practice, you can look for videos that include interviews or dialogs that mostly use HSK 4 vocabulary.

Vital Chinese Videos

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Below is the first video of a playlist that covers all texts of the books HSK 4 Standard Course Texts 上 and HSK 4 Standard Course Texts 下 What is great is that the audio is accompanied by the text consisting of the hanzi, pinyin, and translation. Important bits are color-coded in the Chinese text as well as the English translation. I would suggest listening to the video at first and only looking at the text when you don’t understand something. Replay the video and follow the text while listening to the audio. Then listen to it a third time without looking at the text and see if you can recognize more characters compared to the first time.​

Podcasts

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Another great way to improve your chinese listening are podcasts. While not geared towards HSK4 students it might still be a fun way to get used to the chinese intonation and speech patterns. Below are a list of interesting podcasts that are mostly in chinese to get a full immersion while not being too difficult to understand.

Writing

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For me personally writing the characters is the hardest aspect of the exam as I spent the last few years focusing on speaking rather than writing Chinese. Learning the characters can be a daunting task however keep in mind that hanzi is composed of several building blocks one of which is the radicals. Therefore it’s advisable to study the most common radicals besides studying the vocabulary. Building mnemonics on the components of a character will improve recalling the characters. But make sure to also practice writing the characters.

Skritter and Inkstone

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During my research, I found that there are no great free resources to practice writing characters. When looking for writing apps I read about Skritter. While it seemed that it is the best option to practice writing Chinese characters I don’t like the monthly subscription of around $15. An alternative I found is the app Inkstone which seems to be a distraction-free app to practice writing Chinese characters. Compared to Skritter there you only have to pay a one-time fee of a bit over $5.

Hanzi Writer application

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While Inkstone seems more affordable I went a bit further and built a small Chinese writing tool based on the Hanzi Writer project. The tool uses a simple spaced repetition method to show you words that you encountered during a practice session. The counter at the top shows how many words are left to practice. The counter only decreases if you managed to write the word without using any help and without any mistakes.​

Grammar

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Grammar is not checked directly but may pop up in the texts or conversations. It can therefore be helpful to better understand the context and spot slight nuances. It also helps you to improve your Chinese in the long run.

Chinese Grammar Wiki

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When I struggle with grammar I often consult Chinese Grammar Wiki as they have nicely organized posts on the various grammar points and also link to a similar pattern. Luckily there is a list of HSK 4 grammar covering 115 grammar points.

Chinese Zero to Hero

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Another great source is the Youtube videos from Chinese Zero to Hero. Their channel contains short (around 5 minutes long) videos explaining the grammar and giving example sentences to illustrate how to use the grammar. Below is a video that is part of a playlist of some grammar points of the HSK 4.

Mock exams

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When I was learning for exams in university I was always glad when there were some old exams available to simulate an exam under similar circumstances to the real exam. Luckily there are some mock exams that are provided by different institutes which are listed below. When practicing for the exam it is essential to have practiced some of the exams in one go to familiarize yourself with the general process. Make sure to only play the audio once if possible as this is how it’s done during the exam.

I would recommend you to take at least one mock exam regularly to measure your progress. Time yourself while taking the exam to see how long it will take you. In the beginning, it is totally fine if you take much longer than the allotted time. Make also sure that you check your exam afterward and write down the words you don’t know.

My Progress

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In this section, I’m going to write about my progress until the exam on the 17th of September. After the exam, I’m going to reflect on my approach and see if it was viable and where I could have done better. Feel free to visit the page from time to time to see some updates.

21.07.22 - Designing a study plan

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Before getting into the thick of it I need to get an overview of how much I have to learn every day and when I’m going to learn what. As of today, I have 8 weeks and 2 days remaining until the exam. It would be best to be done a week earlier in order to have enough time to focus on some aspects that I found hard and have some leeway in case I might be too busy during some of the days until the exam. Let’s also assume that I study only 5 days per week for the same reasons. ​

That leaves me with around 35 days. That means that I would need to learn 35 new words every day which includes studying 35 new words in Anki as well as practicing writing 35 new words using Hanzi Writer. Every week I need to read 6 articles and listen to 3 listening exercises. Lastly, I would also need to practice 18 grammar points each week to cover all 125 of them in time.

As I can’t study everything all at once I tried to distribute the different tasks into different weeks. The plan would be to start from next week monday (25th of July). ​In the beginning, I wanna immerse myself by mostly reading and studying the vocabulary as I feel most comfortable with those. I then slowly start to study more and more grammar. In the last weeks, I’m going to shift my focus more on listening. While I’m mostly confident in my listening I wanna do it in the end when I am already familiar with the vocabulary and able to recognize most of the words. Lastly, I also wanna take a Mock-Exam every week to see how I progressed. Take note that the exams don’t add up to 10 as I want to focus on them extensively in the 8th week to prepare for the exam.

31.07.22 - First week

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The first week was rather anticlimactic. Due to work, I didn’t have much time to study. I therefore only read the first two texts in the reading section and only did the first grammar point.

For reading, I would recommend starting with the HSK Reading texts as they are so far quite short and therefore a good starting point. My approach is to translate the text sentence by sentence and then compare my translation to the provided translation. Afterward, I’ll also try to answer the usually easy questions and check the solutions. In the beginning, I made the mistake of writing down every word that I didn’t know. However, I switched the strategy to only writing down the words that might be relevant for the HSK exam which is usually much less.

The only thing that I indeed accomplished was studying 200 words. I used Anki and studied the hsk1-4cn.apkg deck. I set the number of new words to 40 and the number of words to revise to 10. My goal is to go through the vocabulary as quickly as possible and review all the words I struggled with in the end. I also removed the Compounds part in the cards template as I realized that my compounds calculation is quite bad. I would need to spend some time figuring out a good way to split a character into small units that are easier to remember. ​

When I practiced writing I realized that it was not going to be that easy to study 40 new words each day. I managed to study around 15 words per day. During the study session, I also spend some time looking up the names of some compounds in order to remember them more efficiently. I hope this to speed up once I’m familiar with many of the more common compounds.

I hope to speed up my progress next week, tho I already lag behind quite a bit, especially in the reading department. As the first few texts were quite short I hope to catch up with the reading part.

07/08/22 - Second week

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The second week was way more productive. I managed to finish almost all the objectives I set for myself and even made up for most of the objectives that I missed last week. I planned to take the exam on sunday but didn’t find the time to take it.

Same as last week I only made slow progress with the writing section. I feel I have to plan more time for the writing and might have to focus on it in the last weeks.

14/08/22 - Third week

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I was quite busy during the third week but I still managed to finish my reading and listening goals. This week I wanted to switch my focus on the grammar aspect which will intensive in the next weeks. However grammar is not explicitly graded in the exam therefore I should pay more attention to the other aspects.

For the fourth week I wanna take at least two exams to also stay on my toes there and get an idea for how the HSK 4 can play out.

21/08/22 - Fourth week

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Another full week, however I managed to listen to two of the videos and read two texts. I knew beforehand that the goal of doing 20 grammar points was unrealistic and I only managed to two 3 grammar points.

I reflected on the plan that I made at the beginning of my learning journey and came to the conclusion to change it a bit. I know that I mostly struggle with listening and especially writing. Therefore I wanna focus on those. Since grammar is not tested explicitly I try to pick the once that I haven’t heared before but don’t make grammar my priority. I also planned to take an exam every week which didn’t happen so far. Therefore I plan to take several exams next week to get back on track and get a better feeling for the exam.

After the exam

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The last weeks before the exam were quite busy at work, I mostly spend the time that I had practicing the vocabulary and doing the mock exams. The exam went quite okay, I still found that I didn’t memorize all of the words and it seems that the exam also uses some words that are not part of the vocabulary list. That also seems to check out with other articles i’ve read, so it definitely helps to read a lot and learn words outside of the HSK framework.

Conclusion

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What I would recommend to people that are now starting to learn for the HSK 4 is:

• Start early
• Focus on the mock exams first to get a feeling for the structure of the exam
• Use the provided resources after you did all mock exams
• While studying the vocabulary write done a sentences containing the respective word to improve your writing

Did the article help you with preparing for the HSK 4 exam? Did I miss any resources. Let me know your thoughts.