2026-05-02
languagesmandarin
In this entry, I'll explain how I passed HSK 4, in roughly 9 months.
I started to work seriously in August 2025, and I took the exam in April 2026.
(I'll add more later, this is a WIP)
Note : In this entry I talk about the HSK. This exam is currently being updated and now has 9 levels. The new HSK (3.0) levels don't match the old one.
I did the old one (with 6 levels).
More details available on Wikipedia.
Even though I started the grind with a very basic fundation in Mandarin, it wouldn't be fair not to mention by background with other languages, especially Japanese, as it helped a lot.
I knew all the jouyou kanji (everyday use Chinese characters in Japanese), which is roughly 2k characters + some extra ones, traditional variants, etc.
Japanese and Mandarin aren't connected that much but the characters are very similar.
I still had to relearn a lot. I went with simplified characters so some of them were drastically different from Japanese variants. I had to relearn the stroke orders as well, and obviously the pronunciation!
However, Japanese gave me a huge headstart. I already knew how to learn characters efficently and I had a system that works for me.
If you don't know a language that uses Chinese characters already, you will probably need more time to get to the same level.
I started my grind to HSK 4 as pretty much a beginner.
I had some lessons a few years ago, but they were for beginner, basically HSK 1 level class with more cultural explanation than language learning.
HSK 1 is the very bottom of the ladder : around 150 words, pinyin still felt very awkward, tones were confusing, and following even a slow conversation felt impossible.
I was still able to understand some basic written sentences thanks to Japanese, but I couldn't talk and I had a hard time understanding which characters were used for meaning or for grammatical cues.
I started with Migaku Academy (in Migaku Memory).
It's a paid software that contains a beginner's flashcards deck.
Good alternatives are Refold 1k deck, or whatever free deck you can find online that has T+1 sentences and audio.
I then added all the missing words from HSK 4, as Migaku's deck is based on frequency and not the HSK exam.
These two decks + my personal mining until the exam made me reach around 2.5k words. This is twice as much as what's announced by the HSK (1200), but I really felt that this was necessary.
Relying only on the official vocab list is not enough to pass the test confidently, and it's not enough at all to understand real life material.
Then, I moved my mandarin's decks to anki.
It's possible to export Migaku Memory decks to Anki with a userscript, but the Migaku Memory decks are encrypted so they aren't usable. I decided to recreate those cards by myself.
I think it was a good idea because I was able to make sense of those words in context better anyway.
I did my cards everyday until the exam.
I made a simplified Hanzi deck using anki and a javascript lib called hanzi writer.
I studied every hanzi in the HSK 4 (roughly 1k) + some characters I knew from immersion.
I studied writing in particular, because this is part of this HSK 4 exam.
The writing part is not very demanding, you have to :
For the first few months, I studied only through immersion watching donghua, mandarin dubbed anime, YouTube, comprehensive input videos...
In 2 or 3 months before the exam, I realized that my listening comprehension was... really bad.
That's because I relied a lot on reading subtitles and my understanding of hanzi.
So I decided to grind HSK listening mock exams, and to only review my cards with the audio.