Taking the TOCFL (Chinese language) exam and getting wrecked

Introduction

I would like to share my experience taking the TOCFL (Test of Chinese as foreign language); it was my first time taking any sort of exam to test my Mandarin reading/listening abilities. The TOCFL is the Taiwanese equivalent of the Chinese HSK (the more popular and known test, I’d wager) and it uses the familiar A1 to C2 levels. Before going into the details of the test and how it went for me, I will briefly introduce a bit of background on my learning journey and explain my motivation to finally take a standardized official test.

Background

I started learning Mandarin in the summer of 2017, and ever since it has been a serious commitment. Especially in the first years, I took very regular classes, working through the standard HSK textbooks. The last level of these textbooks I completely worked through was HSK 5. Afterward, I vaguely remember doing a mock exam at home and finding it very doable. However, I didn’t feel the need to take an actual exam because I didn’t need the certificate. Moreover, at that point, I saw how these test-focused learning materials put more and more emphasis on written/formal language at the higher levels. But to me, the more interesting skill to practice with a teacher was my speaking and listening comprehension. So that’s what I started focusing on: dropping all textbooks and mostly doing free speaking lessons.

Fast forward to now, I am feeling comfortable using the language to express myself on various topics I care about. I read books and listen to podcasts in Mandarin for entertainment. But I still hesitate to call myself very advanced in the language, as there are still tons of unknown vocabulary, particularly idioms and fixed expressions. Furthermore, native movies and shows are often too hard to follow without (Chinese) subtitles - some too hard even with subtitles. Not living in a Chinese-speaking country, I have already adjusted my initial high aspirations, realizing that it is not realistic to have the same ambitions as if I were living and working in Chinese environments. Still, I am motivated to go further, keep studying, keep using the language for as many things as I can.

So, recently I decided to finally do a standardized test without specific preparation, besides completing a mock exam. I am not sure how I got the idea, but I see it as a good way to measure my current abilities and have a reference point for comparison when taking the exam another time in the future. At the same time, I am still skeptical of test scores as a good indicator of one’s language ability as a whole, but it can serve as a good data point for sub-skills (of listening/reading comprehension in this case). What I eventually hope to see is that I am able to achieve a higher score in the future without actively putting any work into test preparation, but by just continuing to read and listen to things I find enjoyable.

TOCFL exam

The exam was held in a school in Den Haag, and when I entered it was already full with a bunch of kids, most of whom seemed to be kids of Taiwanese parents. I saw only a handful of people not fitting in that category of heritage learners, so I felt like I was sticking out quite a bit. And the fact that the majority of these kids were taking the A or B tests, while I had signed up for the C one made me both proud but also nervous about whether I had been too confident. Passing the C test would mean I get a C1 certificate, and if I had a high enough score, my level would be classified as C2. There were five other people taking the C test and just one of them was clearly not a heritage speaker. His spoken Chinese was pretty impressive though.

The test itself is divided into a first hour of listening and a second hour of reading. The listening section is fast-paced and after finishing an audio segment, the questions and multiple-choice answers are read out once. After each question’s answers are read, a five-second pause is provided to decide on an answer. All answers of listening and reading sections can be revised up until the end, but in the case of listening, that is not very useful as the audio is only played once. The different audio segments ranged from relatively easy to understand topics/vocabulary to very hard (for me) discussions of scientific topics. Each segment had multiple questions, and while there were a few obvious answers, the questions were often quite tricky, even for the easier topics. Overall, I felt quite overwhelmed by the difficulty and the very frequent use of idioms in the answer options (there were a bunch of questions of the form “Which idiom describes this particular aspect of […] the best?”).

After the listening section was over, I was convinced that I had gotten absolutely wrecked. I mean, I definitely got some answers right, but would that be enough? Moving on to the reading section, I tried to be strategic about skimming the text and answers quickly and deciding what to skip. That worked quite well, except that I skipped quite a lot, and when I eventually returned to those texts, I was none the wiser. When checking out the mock materials, I had calculated the average reading speed required to read all the texts, questions and answers to be only a bit over 100 characters per minute. That does not take into account thinking time of course, but still, I thought there was plenty of time. Well, that turned out not to be true. In the end I had to completely skip a long text with a total of five questions and pick random answers (it was something about a particular species of worm, so at least it seems that I chose the right thing not to invest time in).

What killed me a bit inside was that four of the others left before the time was over, including the other white guy in the room. I still can’t comprehend how they could have been so fast to read and so confident in their answers. So, when I handed in my answers right on time, I definitely felt defeated. At the same time, I was able not to take it too seriously; neither do I need the certification, nor is a low test score meaningless. It will serve as a benchmark to improve against. Should I have gone for the B test to ensure passing the exam? Maybe. Now, I am waiting for the result, curious to see whether my listening or reading went better.

The outcome

I was told it may take until January to receive the results. Once I get them I will update this post with my score and reaction.