User Comments - punter888

Posted on: Rome

Changye,

You are right...it was indeed torture. Hence it reached the point where I quickly filled in the bubbles are random and made a sprint for the exit door, making the best of the remainder of a nice fall Hong Kong day. 

This exam could figure prominently as an inner ring in a Chinese version of Dante's living hell! 

Fred

Posted on: Rome

RJ,

I took the test in Hong Kong, purely out of curiousity to benchmark my progress. I expected a big crowd of takers, but there were only 3 people, myself included. Perhaps this explains why there is so little information available on the internet about it! I took the Elementary version, which is the most basic "grown up" version of the exam. They have recently launched a "rote beginner" version of the test, which perhaps would have been more appropriate for me, but I was unable to find info on where to take this anywhere!

I may have scored some on the listening comprehension...40 questions. Listen to short dialogue in Chinese, listen to question in Chinese, then choose from a selection of photographs which applies. 

The remaining 100 or so Q&A were all in Chinese. The first 50 or so were of the format - question in written Chinese, choose from a selection of answers in Chinese. Educated guesses might have enabled me to beat a random score here.

The last 50 or so questions were of the format - paragraph in Chinese, 3 questions in Chinese. With one minute per question, meaning you had 3 mintues to read and digest the paragraph, and get through the answers. This really required mastery of the vocabulary. It was this section were I realized that I was effectively making random guesses. 

Now I know what I am up against for next year. Generally speaking, I think it may be a waste unless one has dedicated some serious hours to learning written Chinese. As it is, I did pretty good to get past the Chinese test application. We'll see if I filled in enough of the test form details (in Chinese of course) such that they are actually able to process my score!

This is definitely not something for the casual learner!

Punter

Posted on: Rome

Off topic conversation here. Just left the HSK Test Elementary level. Let's just say that these people take a different view of the meaning of Elementary than our friends here at CP! After 1 1/2 years or independent learning, I was way out of my league. With most of the test being written, and with page after page of Chinese characters....you think you know how to read a bit of Chinese....recoginize a few characters here and there....needless to say this is a totally different deal from getting through paragraph after paragraph of characters, with multiple choice thereon. After realizing that the contribution of "educated" in my educated guesses was rapidly approaching zero, I capitulated and randomly filled in the remaining blanks so as to leave ASAP and preserve the remainder of my diminishing afternoon. Hopefully I'll find some encouragement in the form of something better than a random guessing score on the relatively small verbal section! Please join me in wishing me better luck next year! 

Posted on: Changes on ChinesePod

Chinesepod is worth every penny and anybody complaining here about their terms of service are looking a gift horse in the mouth. Its a fantastic service and I hope Ken and crowd list it on the stock exchange some day and get rich.  

HOWEVER, at the top of my Chrismas list is a Chinesepond iPhone application....there is so much more that CPOD could be doing in the mobile space....and the existing m.chinesepod.com site is looking sooooo 2007 and with such limited functionality relative to what can be delivered with current technology.....I know they can do better here and I am confident they will! 

Posted on: Taxi Small Talk

I really like the stepped up, realistic tempo of the speakers. I hope that this will help train my ears to understand more real world mandarin conversations! Although frustratingly hard to understand quick tempo dialogue, there is no point to learning to understand a manner of speaking that doesn't actually occur in the real world! Thanks the improvment.

Posted on: Best Friends

I have been told, but refuse to believe, that there is no Chinese word equivalent of "hangover". There have been enough hangovers in the course of Chinese history for somebody to come up with a word for "hangover"!

Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Hong Kong

Would I be correct in guessing that the Putonghua words for these popular dim sum dishes are actually transliterations of the cantonese? For example, in Cantonese the "shao1" in the cha1shao1bao1 sounds like "siew", which I believe is pork.

I will also be the lone "gweilo" dissenter here and go on record as saying 我很喜欢凤爪 （I love Chickens Feet), but only the marinated type. Aside from tasting good, the sauce covers up the goose bumps left behind by the plucked feathers!

Posted on: 还是 háishi OR 或者 huòzhě

Window??? Clay takes dates to Window? That place is grim! I hope none of Amber's short fat dates haven't taken her there for a date!

Posted on: Train to Beijing

I totally second the advice given in the intro, though we dropped into Shenzhen duty free and bought one of those 5-liter bottles of Johnny Walker that swing on the rack, rather than Baiju. A great ice breaker, and we managed to assemble a crowd of total misfits to help us dust the bottle before arrival in Beijing. We could never have done it without the help of the 60 year old Taiwanese merchant marine with the mouth full of gold teeth, who was actually hoarding the whiskey out of fear of running out. Also not sure that the bathroom off the dining car ever recovered its former glory.

Posted on: What'll it be?

There are some real gems in these early lessons. Very challenging newbie here!