Hey has anyone taken the HSK advanced level?

HSK Elementary/Intermediate is definitely not an easy test. Well, Chinese itself is objectively harder (at least for us Westerners) than many other languages, so getting at the so-called intermediate level is also harder...

As for advanced, I only took an official mock test some 2 years ago (it was like taking the real thing, they sent our test to the test center and we got official results, but we wouldn't get any certificates), so I might not remember everything correctly... apart from the test being harder on the whole, there are also some additional exercises not found in the Elementary/Intermediate level, one of them being "choose the (underlined) part of the sentence, which has mistake in it" (I heard that this exercise is included in the new revised Intermediate level as well) and some others, which I have already forgotten.

Then there are those Speaking and Writing sections (which are also going to appear in some form in the other levels after the revision), but since they were not included in our mock test, I can't say much about those (not that there is that much to say, for the Writing section, you just write an essay on a set topic... roughly the same with the Speaking section, only you give a short speech on some topic).

Your vocabulary has to be much wider (the official HSK wordlists are a good start, but that is by no means enough, the more vocabulary outside of these lists you know, the better) than for the Elementary/Intermediate level and your reading speed lightening-fast. Some decent listening skills also come in handy :) but vocabulary size and reading speed are the essential factors for HSK on all levels...

And whether it is worth it? Well, that depends on your personal goals. HSK still doesn't get enough recognition by employers for example (apart from Korea :)), so it might be worthless if you want it for that reason. Personally, I use it as a measurement of my progress (although the test results don't tell you everything)。 f I got a 7 last year and an 8 this year, then there definitely must have been some improvement. It is a motivation, something that helps me studying, and even though some claim, that the test scores are rubbish, the preparation itself is worth it, as I learned much in the course of it...

哇 写这么多的呢 好厉害哦