Lingomi’s RPG Scorecard Chinese Proficiency Assesment

By Confused Laowai | Date: April 19th, 2011 | Category: Language

Steven, from Lingomi, posted a link on Social Mandarin, showcasing his idea of assesing one’s levels in Chinese. I quite like the idea, being a gamer and RPG fan. There should be better and more in-depth assessment categories. This can be both encouraging and discouraging if you try to fit yourself into the framework. I decided to give it a go. These are guesses mostly on my part. But a fun exercise nonetheless.

Character (Writing) – By hand: Level 3 (250 Characters) –  By PC: Level 5 (1000).

Character (Reading) – Level 7 (2000 Characters). I’d say I’m very close to Level 8.

Chinese Vocabulary – Level 5 (1500). The gap between 5-6 is quite big, but I went for a conservative estimate. [I tested myself on a site that estimates one's vocabulary and I was completely off. My estimate is 4135! Thus I've leveled up to 6. Try the test yourself.]

Chinese Grammar – Level 6 (Newspaper 2). Although my vocabulary is still lacking, I’ve got quite a good grasp of Chinese grammar.

Spoken Chinese – Level 6. Once again, I can string sentences easily together, but my downfall is a solid vocabulary and sometimes those complex sentences.

Chinese Listening – Level 5? Steven points out the difficulty with the listening levels. I think there are ways to track it. For instance, you can only listen to slow speech, or unaccented clear pronunciation moving towards native like speed and accents. I would put myself into where I can understand quite a few sentences if spoken slowly, but native-like speed and functional elements I still struggle with. Furthermore, when watching a TV series I still rely a lot on the subtitles to get the full meaning.

Where would you put yourself? Head on over to the post and score yourself.

Related posts:

Online Mandarin Dictionaries
Learning Chinese through Watching TV
Critical Frequency Experiment
  • http://www.sarajaaksola.com Sara

    Looks good! After reading this I had to rate my self too and noticed it was really difficult.

  • Pingback: Trying to grade my Chinese | Living A Dream In China

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Yeah, it’s sometimes hard when you actually look back on what you know and
    even what you think you know!

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    In terms of writing by hand, I guess it’s not a useful metric. I think you
    can add it as a passive buff that aids in reading and remembering characters
    - rolling with the RPG talk here. :)

    Yeah, I agree. In terms of listening, I think should also include things
    like, complete understanding versus percentages of understanding sentences
    and/or conversations. For instance understanding 70% of a conversation on
    the first listen.

    It’s an interesting metric you have. I like it!

  • A A

    Here there – just want to point out that there are serious flaws in that link you posted for vocabulary. That site is highly flawed because it

    A. Doesn’t force people to prove they actually understand the words – more often than you’d imagine people are using wrong translations for words, knew individual words and took a common sense approach for the combination which in that actual case did not yield an accurate translation, etc

    B. It measures vocabulary while most other measurements are on character recognition, not vocabulary

    C. It is not statistically relevant – take the test a few times – you’ll get incredibly high ranges of results

    For a much better test that gives results in characters – not words – try http://www.clavisinica.com/character-test-applet.html and there it’s much more about fluency with pinyin and english definitions required rather than “yeah i totally know what that one means” I’ve taken that test a number of times as well and never had a gap of more than a few hundred characters

    and by the way – your recommended test tells me every time that I know over 15k characters (usually told me I know much more) so I guess I’m more than double your highest level on and if you throw me into a random group of ten young professionals from Beijing I’d probably rank 6th or 7th out of the ten in terms of language ability.

    I would not put any credence whatsoever into that test you posted – it’s an absolute waste of time

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Hi, thanks for the reply and concern regarding the test.

    Although I’m not the author of the test, there is some marked difference in the way that the test you linked (which I also have done before) and ZHToolkit’s one works. One difference, that you also pointed out, is the difference between characters and vocabulary. I clearly stated that it is a vocabulary test, not a character test. The test also makes that clear, so these two tests are fundamentally different.

    Vocabulary would definitely be more than one’s character level, because they are re-used to form different words. For example: 学 can be used in lots of words. 学校，学生，学习，科学，学院 etc. Thus vocabulary will most likely be a lot higher than your character knowledge.

    Furthermore, yes, that test does not test if your knowledge is correct, but what is the point in cheating in a test like this anyway? What’s the point? You can click, show answer if you’re not 100% sure if you know a word, but you’re sort of sure about it.

    In the test you provided, it has also flaws. I guessed most of those characters, because I could choose the right pinyin and meaning by using elimination. Thus, both have their flaws in making sure the user actually knows the words.

    Once again, I’m am usually skeptical about tests like these, but you should read the posts on ZHToolkit’s site, showing his algorithm and research into Vocabulary Testing for Chinese. http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/

    They are extremely fascinating and very in-depth.