Hi everyone

During the last two years I have mainly been using Chinesepods lessons (intermediate and upper intermediate) to learn vocabulary. Ever since joining Skritter I have been studying HSK vocab (mainly) and pretty soon will have got the HSK 1 list done.
I still find though, that I have huge problems when listening to anything slightly formal. Thanks to Chinesepods vocab, I am quite good with all the daily conversation stuff, but the formal things just leave me clueless.

Do any of you know where I might be able to get my hands on some key vocab that would help me at least partly understand what is being said on the news? Will I bump into that sort of stuff in one of the next HSK lists or does one of the learning Chinese studying books we have listed on Skritter contain lots of useful stuff? Or does someone have a cool list coming out which covers exactly that type of area?

Thanks for your help :)

David

There are several sites with old tests that you can dowload. In fact, if you can undestand the upper intermidiate on Chinesepod, you will have no problems what so ever on the HSK 1 test. That is a very simple one. You can e.g. go to this site for old HSK recordings: http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/forlang/chin/HSK/Chinese%20Proficiency%20Test%20(HSK).htm ( the link might be broken due to line breake. Copy and paste both lines if it is not working) orR this site http://www2.asia.ubc.ca/faculty/li/department/test_resource.htm . The first HSk test is not that formal and if you go through the test material you will find that it is relatvely easy stuff. The reading and writing parts should not be any problem for you and if you listen to the recordings a few times I think that you will handle that easely as well. Good luck!

The BBC Chinese 'China Reel' podcast might be useful. It's very political and I don't understand half of it, but it has a lot of the more formal vocab you're looking for. As well as the audio, there are articles relating to the podcast. You can paste these articles into MDBG's annotation tool to make a vocab list. A warning though - it will be a very long, very advanced vocab list!

I also recommend textbooks for that sort of thing. I'm no textbook master, but the lessons in the later books I worked through (A New China, All Things Considered) left me with the opposite of your problem. But textbooks do have a reading/writing focus, it's true.

Another suggestion:
iMandarinPod recently added a daily 慢速新闻 podcast to their site. It's free, and there's even transcripts for the news stories.
Check it out here: http://tr.im/qKVb

Lyons, thanks for the "China Reel" hint. Checking in out this very minute...

Thanks for all the help and links.
I have to admit that Lyons, you are right with your hint that the vocab on China Reel is quite advanced:), the same I think applies to the iMandarinPod.
I guess I will start picking out some articles/podcasts and plough my way through them...nothing for it:)

I will admit that I'm quite impressed at the fact that you guys all seem to already be at that sort of level....long road ahead of me.

In which of the HSK lists can I expect to cover that sort of vocab (or isn't it even covered there?)?

David

Ah, although I like to listen to China Reel I'm still a long way from being at that level! I can get a few sentences but most of it's beyond me. It's just about trying to get as much listening practice as possible... right now, my listening is probably at ChinesePod upper-intermediate to advanced.

One interesting thing about the MDBG annotation is that it tells you which HSK list the words are in. The BBC articles have a lot in HSK4 and beyond!