I’ve been back in Dalian for about a month and a half, and I’ve eaten barbecue kebabs from the same street stall at least once a week. Never had any trouble. Last Saturday I wanted something quick to eat, so I headed down the block to Chengren Jie, Martyr Street. It was yet early, and my usual barbecue stall was still setting up shop. That block has at least ten other stalls and c’mon, they’re all the same. I choose the next one, and started picking vegetables-on-sticks from the big table. In a moment of daring I said, alright, screw it, I’ll try the green eggs.

The green eggs were disgusting, I swallowed only one bite. The color was clearly not the only problematic result of some kind of microorganism’s handiwork. Sam-I-Am was right to be freaked out all along by these sorts of things, but I believe in trying everything once, even green eggs from a street vendor. The lesson here learned, however, is that one should perhaps not be too adventurous when the next morning one has a standardized test for which one has been preparing, on and off, for months.

The next day I took the HSK and of course I had explosive diarrhea.

H, S, and K are the Pinyin initials (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试) for the People’s Republic of China’s official Chinese Proficiency Test. Every standardized test in the world must be known by its initials and must test nothing so well as one’s ability to take that test. The HSK fully conforms – even Chinese people call it “HSK” – and I can’t imagine doing well on it without what I learned in my prep class.

Take for example the reading comprehension section. The reading section, at 60 minutes, is the longest of the test’s four sections. On the elementary-intermediate level test one can score from a 3 to an 8 (the so-called basic test is 1-2 and the advanced is 9-11). To get an 8 one should probably know at least about 3000 characters, and 1500 characters should be enough to get the minimum score of 3. (I’m guessing I’m somewhere in the low 2000’s.) The reading comprehension texts love to be about science and nature just to throw people off with lots of specialized vocabulary and characters they’ve never seen before. So what do you do? Look at the questions first, see what characters you don’t know, since they’re the important ones, and then scan the text for those characters. The sentences immediately around those almost always have the answer. This is much faster than slogging through texts you don’t understand just to forget what little you did understand when you get to the questions. An hour might seem like a long time, but there are a lot of questions and time management is everything on these kinds of tests – especially when you miss the first few minutes after racing through the grammar section for a semi-supervised sprint to the bathroom and back.

Here, give it a try:

Full sample test materials here.

My original, rather-high goal for this test was a 6. A month and a half of practice questions made me lower that to a 5 in the name of warding off too much disappointment. Considering my intestinal distractions during those three long, break-less hours of testing, my score might be lower yet.

I had a high, delirious fever that evening, but I’m all the stronger for it now. I’ll be getting my scores in a few weeks.

[UPDATE: I ended up getting a 6 overall and an 8 on the reading.]