Cool, I liked this quiz. Still not that hard, though -- when are the 论文 fill-in-the-blanks coming, huh? ;)

UI suggestion: make the blank a link to the question, and add a "return" link to the end of the question. Scrolling back and forth is a pain.

Wow. That wasn't easy. 平常, 经常, 常常, 正常...

9/15. Still a long road ahead.

By the way: What is the proper English name for达美航空公司? Do I know that airline?

@johnb,

“中文通”先生，这周晚一点儿会有你想要的高级HSK，希望到时候对你胃口:)

Popup 上的所有中文高手们，大家拭目以待吧！

--Echo

echopopupchinese.com

Delta Airlines, Henning. Makes me think of 到达, so perhaps the name is intended to give us all confidence the flight will actually arrive...?

Will check with Echo on the timing for this one. I know that by the time you get up to the Advanced reading comprehension (these fill in the blank exercises are a different format), you've got a budget of about 1 minute per question all inclusive. I doubt they allocate as much time for these though.

I johnb's recommendation is great - it definitely slowed me down to be scrolling backwards and forwards when doing this one myself. And that's an unreasonable expectation for anyone operating under a time limit.

So about 10 minutes for your sample exercises? I hope that exercise does not count as 1 of those 40 question? ;)

谢谢你的解释， 清楚多了。

Thanks Echo. Don't worry - I have time. Even if it takes five more years that is fine with me :)

@henning,

有你的恒心、毅力和努力，以你现在的水平为起点，五年以后你的中文很有可能和我的水平一样哦。

We'll put some tests made for Chinese teachers and television/radio broadcasters on the site in future too.

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

yeah, that's a really nice article, and fun to read with a bit of hindsight too. the popups here actually eliminate a lot of the frustration I used to have with casual reading. and make Moser's complaints #3 through #5 pretty much non-starters.

#6 and #8 are my big problems, with #8 being the biggest. Not sure how an online platform can help with pronunciation, but it would be nice to have some annotated 文言, maybe some passages from Story of the Stone or Three Kingdoms. Having a good annotated copy of the first chapters of those books would be a godsend. It took me hours looking stuff up when I tried SanGuo, and I only got a few pages in before giving up. Times are a changing.

Thanks for the flattering Echo :)

Marco, that Moser article is a classic. Always good to boast with how impossible that language is that I try to master, to find excuses why it takes me so long, or to simply find some comfort.

Only problem is: That doesn't really help in a constructive way. ;)

that's not particularly fair to Moser, henning and jim. The guy was writing in a period before electronic texts, dictionaries, and just at the advent of the Internet. Even Wenlin was only getting started in the late 1990s.

And he's right on a lot of points. What's interesting is that if you run through his gauntlet of complaints, I figure #2, #5, #6, #7 #8 and #9 are rendered more or less irrelevant by technological progress and standardization around pinyin. I mean... has anyone here tackled Dream without Pleco or another electronic dictionary? Handwriting recognition is a godsend and I pity anyone who has to resort to a paper dictionary with multiple indexes (indexes for indexes???!). It takes me ages to find words even with practice and once you get beyond basic vocabulary even a good dictionary is going to miss half of the more antiquated expressions or just provide the wrong definition.

It's perfectly constructive to let people know they'll need to put more effort into Chinese than French and won't be able to coast through using cognates. And I think one of the comforts of the article in retrospect is the implication that we're making a lot of progress in terms of understanding how to learn. If someone works hard, gets frustrated and people tell them they have attitude problems... well... people will just abandon the language altogether.

@Dave,

Good questions!

Question6: 预期 and 预料 both mean to expect, to predict,to anticipate, but their usages are a bit different. 预期 appears mostly in news reports and the grammar pattern should be: 高于预期，低于预期，超过预期etc. However, 预料 usually appears in the folowing patterns: 意料之中，意料之外。

For question 14, 发布and 通知 have different objects. The object of 发布should be someTHING, e.g.政府发布了一个消息。通知 has someBODY as object. e.g. 我通知他明天来。

If you have more questions, you can post on the site or send me an email at gail@popupchinese.com

Good day!

Gail

Hi Gail, in your explanation above for 预料 you used the examples 意料之中 and 意料之外. So one could say 预料之中 and 预料之外? Thanks.

Scrolling up and down between the text and the options is still a pain and time consuming...