Are our Beginner HSK tests lulling you into a false sense of complacency? Despite the hosannas of praise Chinese speakers routinely shower on foreigners with basic conversational skills, true fluency is much more than knowing the difference between 的, 地, and 得. And if you're focusing too much on conversational Chinese you may need to brush up on your reading skills to improve your HSK prospects.

At the Intermediate level the HSK separates the wheat from the chaff by testing on a wider range of grammar points. If you have trouble with these questions but consider yourself already at the intermediate level, we recommend working through our manually annotated short stories, and clicking on unfamiliar words (especially adverbs and conjunctions) to add them to your private vocabulary lists for later review.