I have about $US6,000 in the kitty. I want to spend between now and early May flat out studying for the TOCFL Level 4 (or 5, depending on how much progress I can make).
What’s the best plan of attack to do this? Would I be best to study in Taiwan (maybe TLI Taichung), or should I study in Xiamen or something, then cross over for the exam?
Which would work out being cheaper and more sensible, do you think?
As for why I don’t simply do the HSK on the mainland - it inevitably involves a writing component, which I’m not terribly keen on (I do practice writing a great deal, but nevertheless…). Also, I would ideally like to find work in Taiwan after taking the test.
My overwhelming priority here in terms of what to do is COST. In reality, I can study reading, writing and listening in my own time - I do want to do a course though, simply to have an opportunity to speak Chinese with other people (something I’m unlikely to have if I come over by myself to take the exam without doing any structured course).
[quote=“LURKER”]I have about $US6,000 in the kitty. I want to spend between now and early May flat out studying for the TOCFL Level 4 (or 5, depending on how much progress I can make).
What’s the best plan of attack to do this? Would I be best to study in Taiwan (maybe TLI Taichung), or should I study in Xiamen or something, then cross over for the exam?
Which would work out being cheaper and more sensible, do you think?
As for why I don’t simply do the HSK on the mainland - it inevitably involves a writing component, which I’m not terribly keen on (I do practice writing a great deal, but nevertheless…). Also, I would ideally like to find work in Taiwan after taking the test.
My overwhelming priority here in terms of what to do is COST. In reality, I can study reading, writing and listening in my own time - I do want to do a course though, simply to have an opportunity to speak Chinese with other people (something I’m unlikely to have if I come over by myself to take the exam without doing any structured course).[/quote]
Lurker,
I would suggest you do two things.
Get some study materials for the HSK test. They are different but they also have some similarities. It couldn’t hurt.
Go to Wikipedia, type TOCFL and print out the 4 sets of vocabulary sheets you can find there for the TOCFL.
I personally suggest you go somewhere nice like Taizhong, although maybe Xiamen is cheaper. Taizhong is cheap enough…
[quote=“LURKER”]What’s the best plan of attack to do this? Would I be best to study in Taiwan (maybe TLI Taichung), or should I study in Xiamen or something, then cross over for the exam?
Which would work out being cheaper and more sensible, do you think?[/quote]
What’s your current HSK/TOCFL level?
I make my own materials and share them for free. The most recent one used about 55,000 parallel sentences from bilingual dictionaries, parallel corpora, government sites, etc., ranked them by difficulty, and then filtered the results down to about 21,000 sentences. I practice and review about 250 per day, and that’s been immensely helpful. In principle, completing all 21,000 sentences would indicate that I’d reached a 5,000±character knowledge base, including Chengyu, which I hear is what we need for the higher-level TOCFL.