HSKK Intermediate test experience

HSK Speaking Test(HSKK) | 英国汉语考试委员会

So yesterday was the day of the test! To be honest, I was studying so much vocab during the past few weeks that I felt like my brain could not take any new words any longer, so the day before the test and actual day of the test I took it really easy and revised very little.

On Skype sessions with our tutors I’ve noticed that being tired really affected how I was speaking, so I gave preference to rest over knowledge.

On the day of the exam my husband wanted to cook meat for me, but I asked him not to because I thought that meat can make me sleepy. The exam was on Saturday at 16:30, so during the day I mostly chilled, we also went for a short bike ride, it was nice to get some fresh air and sun outside.

I had vegan spinach ravioli for lunch, getting my dose of slow carbs and proteins. One hour before the exam I brewed some strong Earl Grey tea and started sipping on it. Twenty minutes before the exam I had one chocolate to boost my alertness. Then the exam started.

Since it was a “Home-edition” I was doing it by myself, with my phone logged in on a Zoom call so that it could be seen what I was doing. I could have potentially written some notes and hid them somewhere where it could not be seen on camera but I was a good girl and didn’t prepare anything.

The first section was repeating sentences after the audio, I felt that it was harder than some mock tests, but maybe it felt this way because I was more nervous than usual. In any case, I tried my best.

Second and third sections were where I was supposed to describe 2 images and answer to 2 questions, 2 minutes per each section, all together 8 minutes of non-stop talking. I had 10 minutes to prepare, and there was a box on my computer to take notes, BUT it was only in hanzi (chinese characters) and so I could not take any actual notes because my focus all this time was on learning vocab via romanized pinyin system only. I wrote some words there just to outline what I was going to talk about, but when I started talking I didn’t even look at those notes and went complete freestyle.

The first image was of a woman at her desktop, so I told her story, that she works in Huawei, where the pressure is very high and I hope that she gets some rest soon, because work burnout is very bad. I also mentioned 996 work culture in China and said that it’s not very healthy.

Second image was of a little girls at the ballet class. I told the story of a little girl who doesn’t like to dance but has to learn it because her mom forces her to. Then I switched to my own experience and said that I wished I learned dancing when I was young because now I’m really into Douyin and TikTok and I wish I started learning earlier so I would be a better dancer now.

Then came the questions. The first one was about cell phones – “Imagine your life without mobile phone, would you be able to survive?” I started talking that in the past I used cell phone all the time because I was constantly on business trips, but now because of the pandemic we’re mostly stuck at home so I started using my laptop more than my phone. However, I still use my phone for Douyin and TikTok a lot and I really enjoy these programs, since they help me learn Chinese and get to know other cultures.

I’m still not sure if I got the second question right, I hope I did. I think it went something like “A lot of people want to travel the world, so they give up their job in order to travel. What’s your take on this?” I started to say that a lot of people fantasize travel lifestyle, but actually it’s very hard to travel non-stop, in the past I lived the life of constant travels and it was a lot of pressure, I constantly felt tired and anxious. So I think that travelling is fine, but it should be moderately, since too much of it can make us unhappy. Then I continued to say that because of the pandemic I was able to study Chinese and get to know Chinese culture and Chinese geography, so now I have a list of places in China where I want to go after the pandemic ends. To be honest I’m not 100% satisfied with my answer, it could’ve been better structured and I felt like I was lacking some important vocab, but at this point I was talking non-stop for 6 minutes.

After the test I felt like a huge burden fell off my shoulders! Now I can finally get back to my normal lifestyle and stop concentrating all my efforts on the exam 🙂

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