are hsk textbooks useless? epic hsk guide pt 2 | HSK4-5
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 พ.ย. 2021
- are yall ready for part 2?? have you ever had this thought: how do i learn a language efficiently? or conversely, what’s the best textbook to learn chinese? are hsk textbooks useless or will they get me to that elusive fluency goal? today we’ll try to answer that question for HSK levels 4-5!
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If you're learning Chinese with a teacher and you're using the HSK5 books, the teacher MUST know how to teach and be able to explain to you what do to in those exercises, since they are challenging. I've had a teacher that actually didn't understand what to do in some exercises, even though she was native Chinese. That was pretty embarrassing, because sometimes she simply said "I don't know". So, I agree with you that you can skip them, especially if you're studying alone, because they will simply exhaust you, discourage you and finally make you lose interest in learning Chinese.
yeahh.. I would rather spend my time going through more content than figuring out those exercises XD
Really inspirational, hope to push through HSK 4 coming months and go for HSK 5 sometime in 2022. Greetings from Beijing 😊 Inspired me to also get in front of the camera sharing the beauty of China!
woww so awesomee!! you can totally do if if you work through it every day!!
and dang that's so amazing!! I will definitely be checking out your videos :)
I use integrated Chinese in school but recently picked up the hsk books because my teacher goes too slow and I’m struggling already so hsk 5 looks terrible
it's always a struggle in the beginning! just keep pushing through and you'll find that it gets so much easier :) you'll look back at the beginning of the book and realize that those same texts you struggled with previously, are so much easier now!
Li Chao Chinese on TH-cam will cover "Hsk1-4" for anyone who's below hsk level 5
thnak you so much!
i've been self studying mainly with duolingo, hellochinese, skritter and immersing myself with chinese shows and podcasts for about 4 months (though not very intensively). It's hard to find lower level readings online, and i much prefer physical books, so i just ordered hsk 2 through 5.
I completely agree with that point on the lower level readings! they're either too easy or not interesting enough to keep me reading. Mandarin companion was good for me for a bit, but I still felt like it was a bit too simplified for me personally, and the topics weren't also super relevant because they use classic stories! Now i'm using standard mandarin weekly since their topics are more relevant to everyday culture (currently it's online I think, but they're plans to ship out weekly articles!).
How much did it cost?
I found both du chinese and the chairmans bao as good reading materiall for all levels. I have been stuck on hsk4 for years and find the HSK5 standard book a little tedious, i like boya as a better structure and learning experience.I do think Hsk3.0 will give people a lift and make them feel they are actually working through things as there are only around 1000 words to learn per level. @@bianca.phdinprogress
These books sound great. I just wish they had a 繁體字 version since that's what I'm learning now. I'd like to eventually be able to recognize both sets of 漢字, so I may still pick these up at some point. I grabbed Integrated Chinese as my first textbook, which isn't a bad book, but it doesn't have as much reading (i.e. comprehensible input) as I'd like. The HSK books seem more like what I'm looking for.
I totally agree!! However, HSK is build to teach you standard mainland Chinese, so if you’re also interested in traditional characters, keep that in mind! If you ever want to transfer over to the Taiwanese dialect, certain word choices and sentence structures may be different! But that should be a fairly easy transition if you consume enough content!
What you could do is use the HSK textbooks and go through a level learning the simplified characters first. Then redo the book but converting the simplified texts to traditional texts using online converters. The benefits to studying in such a manner are this:
1. You learn the words the first pass of the book in simplified, then review the words in context the second pass in traditional. You’ve given enough time between the initial learning and review stages that it’ll be a recall exercise, which will increase vocab retention.
2. You can see connections between simplified and traditional. Many times the conversion to simplified and traditional follow a consistent pattern (sometimes they don’t). You can learn to predict what a traditional character means from your simplified knowledge and Visa Versa
3. You’ll learn how to type in mandarin, which will help speed up your language learning process in the future. Typing up the textbook dialogues into online converters will help you learn how to type and be another act of review!
不仅起不到鼓励的作用，。。。
Not only does it fail it's use as encouragement, ...
But then I'm a learner myself and may be wrong. Thanks for the video.
Thank you for your videos! It has been helpful in deciphering between the different textbooks
Do you have any recommendations for learning more about the characters? I want to learn more about the character etymology specifically, for example the meaning and representation of all the radicals and character components and how they fit together
Like how characters with 三点水 is all to do with liquid etc or characters with 月is to do with the body
so I haven't personally looked into character etymology too much, but there are a ton of books on amazon. character etymology shouldn't be too different from book to book, but i haven't gone through any books myself, so I can't really recommend one. For a free option, the dictionary on yellow bridge has an etymology section!
The example at 4:05 is a bit tricky because a wester point of view understands it differently which makes it very hard to wrap your head around. Good news it that Chinese is fairly "simple" in terms of grammar and a western point of view can understand it easily when it's broken down properly. 不仅，basically means "not only", 起不到，means “not to arrive" ,鼓励的，”encouragement‘s", 作用，“function". Simplest form according to me and my so so translation would be, "Not only is the encouragement's function not acheived,"...you can still possibly cause the child to doubt their own ability. So a decent English translation of what 孙月said would be...But praise is an art form, don't praise too much, too much praise can possibly give the child too much pressure. Not only is the function of the encouragement not achieved, you can still possibly let the child doubt their own ability, and become lacking in confidence. :) I enjoy your videos. Keep fighting the fight. I've been at it a couple of years. It's not easy at all but it does get easier. A few tips that I would recommend would be double checking sentence structures on Chinese Grammar Wiki to get more examples. The HSK books are really lacking in multiple examples. Also, record yourself reading the text and play it back...listen to yourself then the audio files. Do that over and over until you're sick of doing it, then do it some more. I started making the most progress when I hired an online tutor a couple of months ago. I wish I would have done that two years ago, it's nice having someone there to let me know when my tones are off. P.S...when google translate fails, use DeepL translator.
I totally feel that!! thank you for this amazing comment! I noticed that as I got into more advanced sentence constructions, I had to really work hard to not read it from a western perspective. the chinese doesn't make sense because that's not how I would phrase that in english hahah. i've been seeing this more since i'm venturing into sentence mining right now.
i'm working through a new movie on netflix (upcoming summer) and this one sentence got me so hard since I just couldn't understand how the implied meaning makes sense. "我出去一会她就不知道去哪儿了". if you take it in its separate pieces, it makes total sense. I went out for a bit. She didn't know where to go. But in context of the movie, a mom is saying that she went out for a bit and her daughter disappeared. but the way a chinese person would phrase that idea is apparently "I went out for a bit, she (the daughter) didn't know where she went (aka disappeared)".
it'll definitely be a continual process to learn how to turn off my western viewpoints when trying to understand the chinese!!
@@bianca.phdinprogress Haha. Everybody says Chinese grammar is "simple" but it does my head in every time I want to construct a compound sentence.
@@bianca.phdinprogress Maybe the mother means : I went out for only a short while, and she (the daughter) just disappeared to heaven-knows-where. The 她不知道去那儿了 seems like the chinese version of the expression "heaven knows where she went!". I think 🤔🤣
Could be! I asked my bf to help translate (Chinese is his first language), and he’s like that’s just how we express that idea. She didn’t kno where she was going so of course that means she disappeared! Simple! HAHA I’m still wrapping my mind around that one
@@bianca.phdinprogress I'm a bit late here, but after thinking about this a bit, and consulting my partner (who is Chinese), I suspect what's going on here is that the subject of 知道 is still 我, not 她. So: 'I went out for a bit; [as for] her, [I] don't know where she went.' The 她 is like introducing a new element, and the word order makes it confusing, but 我 remains the overall subject.
Great video again, Bianca! Im gonna share it in my chinese study group
Aww thank you!!! Really appreciate it heh :)
I’ve taken tons of practice tests, but my main goal isn’t passing the HSK. I may take an official test after HSK5, but my benchmark will be how well I’m able to understand native content! I’m not working or studying in mainland China, so it’s not required for me to take the tests!
@@bianca.phdinprogress yes, to see if you can undestand them is a good way of measuring. i wanna take the test bc, who knows, maybe i'll be there in a few years haha have u already read the MXTX novels by any chance? she's chinese
ohh what's that? I haven't heard of her before! what genre does she write about?
@@bianca.phdinprogresshi! I just found your channel and thought I’d respond😊
MXTX 墨香铜臭, the author of 魔道祖师. The genre is 耽美.
The drama 陈情令 was based on this novel, and it was the reason I started learning Chinese.
The last few questions in the reading section of the workbooks have like 50 new words per chapter that are unrelated to the main list of new words.
yeah, that's true! I actually stopped using the workbooks at HSK4, because they included a lot of free response questions. Since I don't have a tutor, I had no one to check my work. I found it was more detrimental to accidentally memorize my incorrect sentences than the stick the workbook entirely.
I speak Spanish , French , English and now I’m learning mandarin
I Learn French and English with pimsleur and Rosetta Stone
I would like to know you opinion in pimsleur and Rosetta Stone
I hope you don't mind my little English correction (I'm from England). "opinion in" should be "opinion on". Don't ask me why. That's just how we speak 😂🙈
You could also say "opinion regarding" but that's very formal.
English truly is weird sometimes HAHA
So Rosetta Stone seems like an expensive cash grab. The approach is to teach you a language like a child through pictures, but as an adult, you can learn incredibly fast through other means. It’s also fairly easy to incorporate the mindset of slowly increasing difficult and repetition through less expensive (or even free) means, so I personally don’t think it’s worth the price tag for the content that they do give you.
Pimsleur is definitely more useful. I personally haven’t tried it, but it seems like a lot of people get good use out of it. It focuses on audio and listening, which is great, but you would probably need to add other learning aids as supplements!
Poggers
Are you on HSK 6 yet?
I actually stopped using HSK when I was like 75% through HSK5. I'm using native content now!
@@bianca.phdinprogress one you got to hsk 5 were you able to comfortably watch native content or was it still challenging
@@bianca.phdinprogress Hi! So you bought all the books when you’ve started learning Chinese ? Wasn’t it expensive for a try ?
Maybe not useless, but boring,无聊死了。。。
I can definitely agree with that one!
...I really wouldn't like to be in the shoes of people who use Texbooks to learn a language.
some people like the structure of textbooks, while others find it really tedious. for me, it was great to get me to a high enough level for sentence mining as quickly as possible!
Why not? Those people usually choose to do so, because it works best for them.