Hey,

I am about to subscribe to Skitter. I was just testing the Iphone APP and it is awesome! I've been looking for something like that.

So, I'm taking the HSK in December and was wondering if the HSK wordlists are up-to-date. When did they get updated the last time?

Im curious, since I've heard they change every year a few words.

There was a big change in 2009 when they switched from the old HSK (which had 4 levels of vocab) to the new one (6 levels of vocab). Our new HSK lists were put together by some users from the official lists at that time.

I'm not aware of any updates apart from that, but if there were a few changes here and there that we didn't have, I think it wouldn't matter very much. It's not like the only Chinese words you'll need for the test are contained on those wordlists, or that you'll see even a fraction of them in your HSK test.

If someone is aware of some changes, we'd be happy to update our lists.

I took the HSK1 at the start of October, and only used Skritter to study (plus a few of the practice tests from chinesetesting.cn the night before the exam); I got 100% so I believe that the level 1 list at least is up to date and that contained all the words needed to pass the exam.

They say other things during the tests in Chinese such as "we will now begin the listening section, first I will blah blah blah... this is an example question... " but you don't need to understand those bits word for word; if you try a practice test or two you will know when the actual questions are coming.

HSK1 is obviously quite basic, even for me who only started trying to read/write characters with the release of the Skritter iPhone app, and have been speaking/listening not much longer. The last few months however have been extremely busy and eventful in my life (mostly in a bad way), so I don't see how I could have fitted in a few minutes of study a day and made so much progress any other way.

I am working towards and looking forward to trying HSK 2 or 3 soon. My 2 year Skritter subscription has paid for itself already in terms of how much my Mandarin has improved. A few native speakers who I know are quite astonished by how much my Mandarin has improved in such a short time.

Thanks!

Congratulations Alan - keep up the hard work!

I am now studying for HSK 2 and 3, and I have noticed quite a few differences between the 'official' 2012 word lists and the Skritter lists (I counted 14 differences for HSK2, and 40 differences for HSK3; which is 14% of the list).

I am using as my definition of 'official' the lists in HSK-2012.xls at the bottom of this page: http://www.chinesetest.cn/godownload.do (this is the site where you actually register to take the HSK, so I think it's pretty much 'official')

Skritter's current HSK lists are closer to the lists published on the Lingomi website which claim to be built from the 2010 HSK list, but not completely identical to those either. As you mentioned the differences are small, but if you are studying for an exam it is nice to at least have studied all of the words you are expected to know.

I have created my own HSK lists based on the chinesetest.cn 2012 lists, to use instead of the official lists if you want the latest words- I'm not sure if the official lists will be updated. They are here:

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=283956215 HSK 1
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=283901923 HSK 2
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=283898018 HSK 3
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=283894926 HSK 4
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=283920769 HSK 5
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=283948344 HSK 6

One slight complication of creating these lists is the fact that different meanings of a character are sometimes given at different levels. For example 喂 (interjection, 'hey') is level 1, and 喂 (verb, to feed) is level 5. Skritter can't really represent this, so I just duplicated 喂 in both level 1 and 5's lists; this something to watch out for when studying though. When a word appears multiple times in the same list as a different grammatical item (verb, noun, etc.) I have included it just once in the list.

The lists are currently in the order given by chinesetest.cn, which is in sorted by pinyin. This is in some ways not as user friendsly as the order of some of the existing HSK lists (which for example group all the numbers together), but it allows for easy comparison to the official lists, keeps words beginning with the same 字 together, and is quite nice to browse through.

By Jove, you're right! I've studied the whole HSK 6 list on Skritter, but I still found new 58 words in this version. There were a few more than that that hadn't been studied, but I more or less know those already, even though Skritter doesn't know I know them. Anyway, thanks for pointing this out. I'm taking the HSK this Saturday, so it looks like I've got some cramming to do!

Wow, just in time- I'm glad the lists could help.! Hope the exam went well.

I've created a few more Skritter HSK lists which list the most frequently used words first- should be a better order for people learning them for the first time than the previous alphabetical lists. You can download the raw lists and find links to each of the Skritter vocab lists here: http://www.hskhsk.com/word-lists.html

I definitely recognized at least a couple of words from your list on the exam. I'm not sure if it will make a difference in the end (haven't gotten the results back yet), but in any case I was glad I knew them.