Make New HSK Courses?

Community-Created Courses Chinese
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Hello everyone,

I’d like to discuss some things relating to HSK courses, and also to the HSK courses that were made by BenWhateley.

Especially now that the feature to automatically ignore items that have already been learned is gone, I think that the format of the HSK that were made by BenWhateley doesn’t work very well. If someone learns all of the items in the HSK 1 course, now when they go to learn the items in the HSK 2 course, they have to either relearn everything that they learned in the HSK 1 course or manually ignore items that they already learned. When they go to learn HSK 3, etc., they have to do the same thing.

An argument can be made here that people should just start learning at the highest HSK level that they hope to complete, but I think there are some advantages to starting at HSK 1 and working your way up. The fact that many vocabulary items was spread across more than one of the courses was always an issue, too, as often an error would be corrected, an alternative answer would get added, or a definition would get changed in one course but not in another.

I understand that people don’t want to make major revisions to these courses because it would disturb the people who already learned the items in the courses, but I think something needs to be done, in the form of making some new courses. Do people agree?

Also, while we’re discussing this, do people think it’s helpful for the course to have all of the “building blocks” that are used in characters that are in the HSK list, or would it be better to just have the words that are in the HSK list? Personally, I think it might be better to just have the words from the HSK lists. I kind of like the idea of having all of the building blocks included, but I think that in actuality, it just makes learning too slow, and in fact, it might often be better to first learn the word from the HSK list and then afterwards learn the building blocks, perhaps in a separate course.

If we do make a new course, something that I’d like to discuss is possibly adding three way testing to the course: Showing characters and testing on pinyin, showing characters and testing on English, and showing English and testing on characters. I realize that some people don’t like testing by showing English and having people type characters, but to me, it sometimes feels like I know what the characters mean, and I know how to pronounce them, but when I’m actually talking to people and I need to think of how to say an English word in Chinese, it’s not there, and I think that showing English and having people type Chinese might help fix this. However, this isn’t something that I’m sure about, and if people really don’t want this, then I understand.

Finally, if there anyone who would want to champion this? @DrewSSP, you’ve been doing some good work with your HSK level 6 course. Did you generate the course with scripts, and if so, how hard would it be to do the same thing for the other HSK levels?

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@neoncube ~ since I reside in a country that uses Traditional characters, I am not inclined towards HSK learning, but I must ask, what do you mean by “building blocks” ? (radicals, perhaps ?) If you do mean radicals, then I would suggest users learn this up front since it greatly helps one with character recognition and understanding. To learn them afterwards is kind of counter intuitive IMHO.

I do however like most of your recommended suggestions for HSK learners. My suggestion to others who have asked me about Mandarin learning has always been to learn from bottom up. Don’t try to shoot for the sky in the beginning. Be humble, and learn slowly. It’s better to learn slow and reap the fruit of the journey than to struggle and suffer the anguish of something over one’s head. Pride can sometimes be a great de-motivator.

Personally, I am a fan of only two way testing, English to character and character to English, but I realize that pinyin is a big deal to HSK and to new learners of Mandarin from western or romanized native languages (which is the only reason I included it in the TOCFL courses.)

And yes, by all means, if one has the ability to type characters from their keyboard, that is an excellent way to learn. Not everyone however is so inclined, or fearful, but hopefully that fear passes quickly. It’s always “cool” sometimes to step back every once in a while and view some characters you have typed and give yourself a pat on the back knowing that you learned how to do that. Something many others in the world can’t, or will never take the time to learn. Yet you did. Small victory, but emotionally satisfying to a new learner !

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What I like about Memrise is this abundance of courses to learn from. I understand the need to make new better ones all the time and am grateful teachers take the time to do so.

As for the HSK courses, I recently passed HSK2 and hope to start my road onto HSK3 once I finished my current studies. I have already “earmarked” the courses I will use because they complement each other well. At the moment I carry on revising over 3 HSK2 courses and the 2 Mandarin/French courses I created for myself, and others.




There will be an audio course only with HSK3 vocab, I will start the level 3 of the HSK 1-6 course and move on to Ben’s HSK3 course because it has the building blocks and is very complete. It works for me so far.

I agree on all the points you made about learning as I exposed here, I agree about your 3-way learning proviso. As for the pinyin it is key to learning and pronouncing. And from HSK3 it is absent from testing papers so the student has to know his hanzi anyway.

Concerning ignoring already learned items or reviewing basics in each course, I think it’s a personal taste, I like to go back to basics and keep on reviewing them (for example the genders in some languages can be forgotten), unless it’s real basic stuff like numbers or pronouns … then I use the ignore button.

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I mostly created the HSK 6 course using scripts. I’m willing to do run these scripts at any time because it’s so easy for me but none of them actually create levels for courses or populate databases. They just update things that are already there.

I agree that something new needs to be made but I am not completely sure that these courses will generate enough popularity to merit it. Also, the mems won’t carry over, which will be a major issue. Another complication that I foresee is the current error on bulk upload, in which every 100th item gets erased.

As I said, I’m willing to run my scripts on any courses. As for spearheading this undertaking, I don’t think I would be able to commit enough of my precious study time. With my scripts, I can:

  • take the chinese word in column 1 and create the english translation in column 2, along with generating alts for the answer (all using the CE CCDICT dictionary
  • generate chinese audio use Google TTS for any word that doesn’t have it
  • fix the problem with phantom answers appearing in multiple choice questions.
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Thanks for the replies, guys :slight_smile:

@pdao, what I originally meant by “building blocks” turned out to be incorrect, so please disregard that :slight_smile: I’m actually just studying the HSK courses because they seem like they do a pretty good job of teaching useful vocabulary and Memrise has fairly good courses for them, not because I’m preparing for the HSK tests. There are some HSK courses on Memrise with traditional characters too, but I think your Chinese might already be pretty good, so I’m not sure how useful studying them would be to you.

Do you just remember the pinyin without being tested on it, or do you use bopomofo, or what do you do?

@sircemloud, in this case, what I meant by ignoring the basics is that I believe the HSK 2 course contains all of the material from the HSK 1 course, and the HSK 3 course contains all of the material from the HSK 2 course, etc., so especially at the higher levels, you end up either relearning or ignoring a lot of items.

@DrewSSP, okay, good to know. If people really want to keep the mems from BenWhateley’s courses, it might be possible to ask Memrise to clone the courses and then go through and manually strip out everything that was included from the lower level courses (and possibly the definitions for individual characters, too, depending on what people want). Personally, I think I’d be happy starting with a clean slate, though.

What are people’s thoughts about including definitions and pinyin for the individual characters that make up the words? For instance, if one is learning the word 关系，do people think it would be good to also separately learn the characters 关 and 系? Personally, I’m leaning away from including them, but I’d be interested to hear what other people think.

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@neoncube ~ as far as pinyin goes, I don’t pay attention to it. It is not used here in Taiwan, except as secondary information on street signs and poorly translated road maps. Young children here (and foreigners) learn Zhuyin (bopomofo) and then progress directly to characters. Zhuyin has two benefits to it for both children and foreigners: it has more accurate pronunciations of sounds and it teaches symbolic character recognition from the onset (rather than reliance on romanized characters). Zhuyin then just flows naturally into characters and isn’t used by older children or adults. We also type using Zhuyin on our keyboards, cell phones, etc to produce characters, whereas others probably type pinyin to produce characters.

Interesting note: A few months ago I was walking with some junior high kids in a part of town they didn’t generally frequent. We came upon a road sign and I covered up the Chinese characters with my iPad and only allowed them to see the pinyin characters. I asked them if they could read aloud the pinyin and they looked at each other and gave a glaring look at me that made me realize I was making them feel uncomfortable. Pinyin didn’t have meaning to them either.

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If I were to try to make a maximum useful and effective course for learning Chinese, and I decided to use the words from the HSK as one of the pillars (which would not be an automatic choice), I’d still try to use subs2srs (although that would be challenging), but I’d definitely try to use sentences, for example from Download sentences - Tatoeba. I’d segment them using Chinese Text Analyser | Features and arrange them in Excel (I’d associate each word in each sentence with their frequency in a frequency list (from most frequent (1) to least frequent (n)), sum the total of the sentence, and arrange the sentences according to this total). I’d perhaps also filter out the sentences with words not in the HSK, but that also wouldn’t be an automatic choice.

The HSK only has 5000 words, so it would also be an option to have someone proofread and speak the sentences, although for less effort you could just use the Anki files floating around.

If you just want to ignore words, you can use the auto ignore userscript from here:

which was created for this exact purpose.

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Only if those individual characters also are stand-alone words perhaps. In addition to my previous comment, I would include etymological information and the definition for the first two characters in the word (that’s 4 columns in the way I do it, 2 if you combine the two).

Can you not just use the standard Chinese database and then they are included? After the database is linked you can change your definitions and perhaps also columns.

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I am totally in favor of the creation of new HSK courses, with the following assumptions:

  • courses need to be indipendent sets, NOT mutually inclusive (this is a MUST given the absence of the “auto-ignore” function). If I want to start an HSK 4-5-6 I must be able to do so without the pain of worrying about ignoring words.
  • successful mems added or created by users should be preserved OR copied (there are very successful mems which have been created throughout the years).
  • items taught in courses should be shown and ordered by FREQUENCY (to ensure that the first characters you learn are also those you get more exposed to in the real world). This will definitely strengthen the learning process.

To answer @neoncube:

  • IMHO, a course should contain definitions for all individual characters that make up its words, only if these hanzi are new and have not appeared in previous HSK courses.
  • as for the testing method, I think it should be different from course to course:

BASIC COURSES (HSK 1-2-3)
testing in pinyin + english .

ADVANCED COURSES (HSK 4-5-6)
testing in chinese + english.

This is because IMHO Typing pinyin is helpful for basic learners (hsk 1-2-3) users, but it is a drag for an advanced user. I typically have to review hundreds of characters, I do not have the time to type in pinyin and numbers!
What is most important is that when I review I hear the pronunciation of the word.

Hope this feedback helps. Thanks for taking interest in this situation!

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I am making my own HSK 4 and over/intermediate to advanced course containing synonyms and other methods of disambiguation - such as (2, y), meaning 2 characters, first pinyin letter y. I am shamelessly using the audio from the general database, and trying to use as much as native as possible

I find lack of disambiguation one of biggest plagues of all HSK/intermediate advanced courses…

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@neoncube
You’re expressing something that has really concerned me with the HSK courses for a while. I don’t know if other people supplement their learning in a way that this is a non-issue, but I completely sympathize with your mentioning of testing the “English” to character. I live in China and in conversation very often come to an English meaning in my head where suddenly the Chinese escapes me.
If i’m given an English word, for example “to strive”, and also given a list of Chinese characters to choose from, I can pick correctly most of the time. If I’m given the character, I can choose correctly from English choices and ALSO produce the English meaning in my head. My problem, and I think this is what you where implying, is if I am given an English word, I sometimes cannot produce the Chinese. By this I mean I cannot think of the visual character in my head (which isn’t as troublesome) OR how to say this meaning in Chinese (which impacts conversation/writing).

There’s something different about the app vs. website that makes this a bigger problem somehow. I think the website might just drill the questions more times and is less forgiving. But the problem I believe is a lack of testing that allows you to naturally PRODUCE the spoken Chinese FROM the English. I haven’t meddled with making courses much but if you know what to do to make this happen, I will lend lots of time to create an HSK 5 and 6 course that addresses this. Or if you want to recreate the entire HSK courses, and some others are willing to pitch in, i’ll be willing to pitch in also.

Alternately, I think you can download memrise courses into Anki and then modify the flashcards on there. What i’m doing currently is walking around with a notebook of the English words of the lessons I learn. While walking around I make sentences using their Chinese without relying on looking at the Chinese. I think this uses the speaking/writing portion of the brain vs. the listening/reading. Look at English - find Chinese word in head - produce sentence.

Additionally, one thing I’d really like to see in 5 and 6, is words introduced as single characters before they’re shown as compound words. This is how it was in previous HSK courses and I think the current HSK 5 basically forces you to learn two words at once, then rely on their relation to remember the compound word. I feel like that’s building houses with paper foundations sometimes. I’d actually be willing in the short term to just settle for a re-ordered HSK 5 course that introduces characters in an order that supports compounds.

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strangely enough, the “primal” memrise had such feature indeed, paving the way from building blocks to compounds. “They” took it out, and unfortunately the “zerohour” memrise users who built the first Mandarine courses (I mean not Ben) are gone… they would remember better how the feature worked :pensive:

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I remember reading on a thread sometime back, I think it was Ben that had said it reflecting back on how he made the courses and said that he took the word lists and put them through some kind of algorithm and they came out ordered by radical/root. Not sure if he could be contacted to comment on that.

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well, Ben cannot be bothered lately (i mean the last two years or so)…:grin: Guess the company got too big, or he is working on several projects…

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I agree with the need to test from English word ==> Chinese word. I find that the blue HSK courses I went through to be incomplete. Because I find the testing from Character==> Pinyin to have no real translation to a language skill. I even tested this, I would grab a dialogue/podcast, learn the pinyin of all of the words I didn’t know, and I still could not understand what was being said… so clearly, there needs to be a more active retrieval of that information in your brain. The “clue” being given is just too great when you are provided the characters. For example, it is very easy in these types of courses to know the individual pinyin of both characters, but not know the English meaning. So, you never are forced to associate the pronunciation with the definition.

I find that this testing direction is really useful for helping me to memorize the pronunciation, and sometimes, it even helps me with listening. There already are courses that do this though. The one I am working through right now (HSK Complete With Examples by Niallo) does this. I find to be successful in these courses you have to already know the English meaning of the characters before you can approach it this way. It is so helpful in fact that I find myself translating my thoughts into Chinese in my head because of how easy it is to pick up the pronunciations after learning the English meanings of the 2-character words.

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Hey Drew, I saw in another forum you mentioning the creation of the new HSK 6 course, which is awesome. I mentioned below but i’m curious if you have any feedback on how to create a HSK 5 course that is basically the same as this one but teaches component characters before teaching a multi-character word, ie. teaching 蔬 before teaching 蔬菜.
Also, in instances where there are characters that are not taught in the course but are_emphasized text_ included in a multi-character word that is taught(whether before or after a compound word they are in), could they be included as well?

Just curious of the manpower or simplicity of doing something like this. I know for the word order, I read somewhere that Ben originally ran the vocab lists through some script.

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Hey I just wanted to shoot you a sort of primitive method I’ve been doing to sort of solve this issue we were discussing and I think it’s working a bit. Basically when I learn new words, I write them down ONLY in English in a little notebook. I carry this book around with me and read the english and say a sentence with the Chinese in my head. I also try to use those English lists to write sentences in Chinese once in a while on my computer. I find that using the words this way forces you to “produce” the word yourself and has been aiding me a bit in conversation with even relatively new words vs. podcasts and flashcard systems that are more focused on the passive elements of learning.

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@Wuxian Hi Wuxian. If you are thinking about making an HSK 5 course, I should warn you that it’s a lot more effort than you are expecting. I am always an advocate of the logic where you should triple the amount of effort you think something will take the first time you attempt it. Making Memrise courses is no exception. I ended up building that course almost completely with scripts because I was just fed up with a lot of the repetitive work.

As for the character script that Ben used, that was simple Regular Expressions. It’s pretty simple if you have any experience with that. I did it for you. PM me your email address and I can forward it to you. I can’t upload it to this forum.

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@Spurdosparde

Regarding Auto-ignore scripts made for HSK Courses:

I used your scripts you posted back in April on the old forum to auto-ignore HSK 2 to 4; I’m now up to HSK 5 but I can’t manage to modify the script for it to work, despite following the instructions you wrote. If you (or anyone else good with this) can modify the HSK 4 script for HSK 5 I would be really really happy :slight_smile:

Links: Script for HSK 4: http://pastebin.com/uJLgNKXK

Original Forum Thread (which contains more links): http://web.archive.org/web/20160528193148/http://www.memrise.com/course/984/hsk-level-4/thread/1779663/

Thanks for reading this far, you are awesome :smile: I’m sure I’m not the only person with this problem :persevere: :disappointed_relieved:

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The below looks at the first column (prompt I think), to have it look at the second column, change all 3 instances of col_a to col_b: