How to prepare for HSK 7-9 Advanced Exam

The HSK exam is the official proficiency exam for the Chinese language. It is meant for foreigners who need official proof of their Mandarin Chinese level or want to test their knowledge to set concrete goals.

The current HSK has levels 1 to 6 and newly introduced advanced exams covering levels 7-9. There are plans to update the level 1 to 6 exams in the coming years, as in over 10 years they are well due an update. There is no word on when the update will be done, so at the moment it is still possible to do the current HSK. It might take years before changes are made and the levels 1 to 6 most likely will be made harder than they are now.

When levels 1 to 6 stay the same, they did already introduce the new advanced exam which covers levels 7 to 9. Officially there is not much we yet know about this exam, but Expat Chinese founder and head teacher Sara Jaaksola took the exam in November 2022 in order to share her knowledge with other learners.

I signed up for the exam without knowing much about it, other than it being a lot more demanding than HSK 6 that I had taken in 2013 and 2016. Luckily we were able to do a mock exam a week before the actual test, so for the last week I had a better idea on how to prepare my self. Taking a HSK test is partly about your language level and partly about being able to use test taking strategies.

Sara Jaaksola

To share what she learned from the new HSK 7-9 exam, Sara made a series of YouTube videos where she shares her experience in detail:

Preparing for the HSK7-9 exam (at first, without knowing the test details)

Mock test for the HSK 7-9 exam and updated learning plan

Experiences from the actual HSK 7-9 exam

Sara also recently appeared in the Hacking Chinese podcast where she discussed the exam with the host Olle Linge, also an accomplished Chinese language teacher from Sweden. You can listen to the podcast episode below and also remember to subscribe to this amazing podcast about how to learn Chinese!