Posts Tagged ‘vocabulary’

Almost one grand of mnemosyne entries, yay…

Thursday, September 27th, 2012

Wow, just look at that 4-digit number in the lower right corner (not marked in red, so you have to look harder ^_^)

I wonder if mnemosyne will crash if I add another entry? Or maybe the universe will collapse.

Anyway, I just got started on mnemosyne about four years ago and have since added 10⁵-1 entries, ranging from vocabulary in Japanese, Chinese, Italian, keywords for the  LPIC tests and more. Only a few were imported from lists, all others were inputted by hand.

This software really has helped me a lot memorizing all that vocabulary and I can only recommend it. Sometimes it’s hard to do these exercises every day but it’s definitely worth it.

HSK level woes

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Another day, another failure…
In my quest to conquer another language I started learning Mandarin two years ago. I’ve taken an introductory course two years ago and am working on a second textbook which will soon be finished. So it was time to find a new textbook and I’ve decided on a textbook based on the HSK curriculum – but the research prior to acquiring the textbook was not sufficient.

What happened?

Taking a quick look at HSK in wikipedia I grabbed the info that there was a Elementary level. Thinking this level might suit me fine I ran off to a bookshop to order a textbook because I couldn’t find anything appropriate on Amazon. They ordered the book for me and I picked it up this weekend. By the way, between ordering the book and handing it over to me, the price was raised 5%. I think I will call them about this… Anyway, thumbing through the book I felt somewhat intimidated – the content looked quite tough. Many unknown words, long sentences – this is Elementary? I thought, suited for beginners (association: elementary school)

Some more googling revealed the following: HSK is divided into four levels: Basic, Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced where as Elementary and Intermediate are grouped into one. Unfortunately, the lowest level is not Elementary but Basic.

Looks like I’ll have to get a different book…

For the time being, from this page you can download vocabulary for the different levels in different formats, even pre-formatted for Mnemosyne, my favourite educational vocabulary tool:

http://hskflashcards.com/download.php

cheers

m.