Mandarin Mountain Challenge (HSK1-HSK9) — Intro

If you have gone out of your way to open this post, you probably share one of, or both of these traits with me:

1. You are learning (or want to learn) Mandarin, or another language.
2. You have a mini-obsession with ‘challenge’ content, 30-day challenges, every day challenges, stuff like this.

Whatever your reason, I’m glad you’re here, so let’s get into it…

Inspiration

I have always loved this kind of stuff, progress challenges, ambitious attempts to do something big in an impressive amount of time. It has been one of my downsides, and lost me a couple of jobs in my earlier career of ‘boring office work’. My desire to be impressively quick led to basic errors and oversights. Also, in both hobbies and skill acquisition, this drive to do-and-achieve often waned, when it came to the actual ‘doing-and-achieving’ part.

But that’s the past…

Fast forward to now. I’m 28 (29 on November 29th), living and teaching English in China. Part of the reason I wanted to relocate was an interest in languages, the idea of immersion interested me (shoutout Benny!).

So, the fire to do something like this has been there for years, but the actual trigger to beginning this challenge has to be credited with reading Scott Young’s ‘Ultralearning’. On a two-week working trip to Guangzhou, I went to the Guandong Foreign Book Store and went a bit crazy, buying 18 books (16 pictured).

My reading stopped for a few years, and has picked up a lot since arriving here In April. For all the changes I made, reading might be the one I’m most thankful to myself for (shoutout Ryan Holiday!).

Many of them are classics and philosophy books, which I feel I should have read by now, but, I spotted this one on the shelf, and recognised the name of the author. It was the one I was drawn to and the one I read first…

Scott Young, to those who don’t know him, came on my radar several years ago, and was living the life the younger (and current) me would dream of. He was both insanely ambitious and completely grounded. He learned the MIT Computer Science degree in a year through self-study.

When I was learning Spanish myself, I discovered his ‘No English for a year’ challenge — he travelled to Spain, Brazil, Taiwan and Korea, three months at a time consecutively, with the goal of becoming a competent speaker at Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin and Korean respectively.

This to me, and probably to you, is about as cool as it gets. Not only would he have had an amazing year full of awesome experiences, he learnt 4 languages! He maxed out fun, fulfilment and productivity by setting himself a crazy challenge and committing.

Young says in the last paragraph of ‘Ultralearning’… ‘If you finish reading this book and have been encouraged to try your own project, this would be my greatest hope’…it would be awesome if he read this one day, I will probably email him and direct him here, alongside thanking him for the awesome book.

I’m ready for my mountain.

The Mandarin Mountain

The most notable levels of attainment in the Mandarin language are through the HSK system, which currently has 6 levels. This year however, an overhaul has been announced:

. There will be 9 levels of HSK.

. The already existing levels 1–6 will be made significantly more difficult.

. The vocab lists have been made larger, slightly altered and modernised.

. The methods of testing have changed, and details of the new test for 7–9 will be rolled out next year.

Whilst getting there will be tough, the aim of the goal is simple — achieve HSK9 before my 30th birthday on the 29th November 2022.

I’ve seen stories of people who’ve achieved HSK6 in a year, through full-time formal study. I will be working full-time (plus some extra classes) as an English teacher and enjoying other hobbies and goals (which you will hear about on other posts I’m sure).

Resources:

This is a long process, and I am sure to make tweaks tohow I go about it. To start, I will be using the following tools:

1. Anki — For memorisation, I love flashcards, a quick and easy way to expose yourself to the vocab at the click of a button. there is a specific way I am going to approach flashcards (for a different post). I have a pre-made deck containing all 11'092 words (you read that right) which make up the full HSK9 body of vocab. (I do not know what the rules are with posting links — I will edit when I know and add the Reddit post I found it, the guy deserves a shoutout it must have took him ages!).
2. Hellotalk — This app is amazing, it’s the first thing I would recommend to any language learner who hasn’t used it. It’s a social media website geared towards language exchange. You can search directly for people learning your language, who natively speak the language you want to learn. Everybody has a profile where they can post updates (like Facebook or Instagram). The chat has features to translate and correct people messages easily. Also, I’ve met some great people on here.
3. Immersion — Whilst the hardcore memorisation cannot be avoided, I will be doing Benny proud and taking advantage of living in China. I will actively seek conversation, both on Hellotalk and in person, to practice the vocab and grammar points I’ll be learning, and seeking feedback.
4. Pimsleur — A friend here gave me all 120 lessons of the Pimsleur Mandarin course. I will be completing that this year. It’s very good at teaching sentence structure, pronunciation and grammar.
5. HeCourse materials — I’ve been doing the HeCourse since I came here. It was created by a local guy here, a software engineer by trade. He has a unique method, teaching writing and reading characters from day 1, skipping pinyin until a later date. He has his own textbooks, online software and keyboard app (he replaced pinyin with a basic number system for each stroke). I will be completing his third (and final) book by the end of the year, before fully moving into the HSK material. If somebody wants to know more about this course, contact me.
6. ChineseGrammarWiki — This neatly puts together and ranks by level all the HSK grammar points, explaining them and providing examples in the straight-forward Wiki format. I think this will be my main go-to.
7. This blog — I will be updating here as a form of reflection.
8. Youtube/Google/blogs etc — Yeah, I will be using various online methods to learn what I need to learn.

There will be more posts about my methods and thoughts on how to complete this challenge.

Where I’m at now?

I am very much a beginner, but not a ‘complete beginner’, just to be clear. I would fail a HSK1 test though. Just for full disclosure, I have been doing the HeCourse book 1 for characters and pronunciation. I am using Hellotalk and have just started sending voice messages to get corrected by people.

Conclusion

The point of this blog this was primarily a way of reaching out to people who are doing similar kinds of challenges and sharing ideas and thoughts. I am new to Medium, and expect it to be months before these posts start getting regular views. But, if you are there, it would be great to hear from you.

All the best