Hsk Standard Course 5A - Textbook (Chinese Edition) Paperback – April 1, 2015

This text and the 5b text were helpful in learning how to read HSK level 5 characters. I think the author did a wonderful job presenting articles, vocabulary and practice. However, I did not only rely on this textbook as I used many other resources both online and hardcopy materials. Highly recommend this textbook as an invaluable aid.

It's a great book with a load of common vocabulary that is needed for understanding higher levels of Mandarin. These standard course books not only adequately prepare you for the HSK exam, but also for speaking Chinese on a more fluent level.

The product description here is outdated. The book now ships without a CD. You have to use a QR code on the back cover to get the audios that formerly were on a CD. The trouble is that 1)Not everyone has a smartphone. So if you don't have one, you can't get the audios and 2)I had to download a new app to use a QR code on my android phone. Of course QR codes are as common as stop lights in China, but they are not in the US, and I had to figure this all out on my own while being annoyed, in order to get the audios. So 3)It's just not right for a product to be described as having a CD included when that is not so.

Beware! There is absolutely no pinyin to support the reading of Chinese characters.

Even though it's FAR from ideal, this is basically the best book I've found to learn HSK 5.It's a significant jump in difficulty from HSK4 and some of the texts are extremely boring (like "I don't want to learn Chinese anymore" boring) and sometimes introduce words in unnecessarily complicated contexts. For example, there's a page-long text about the geology and the various minerals that contribute to the formation of spring waters in Jinan, there's a 2-page long article about making radish pie. The corresponding workbook is poorly organized and you cannot really tackle it before you finish all of HSK 5 since most the exercises aren't restricted to words you've learned in previous lessons. The "grammar" explanations are often just one line long. Most of the texts are 500-700+ character long articles (not dialogues) so it gets a bit monotonous. The audio (which by the way wasn't shipped but you can find on blcup) is spoken by various speakers but a couple of them are almost unintelligible, even after having read the texts.I'd argue that this textbook alone is not sufficient and it is very hard to make progress on your own just by reading it. In my case I got a language partner to help me out and I would have lost all motivation much earlier otherwise.But this is the HSK5 book. I tried various other things but this is the only one I found which moves you through HSK5 albeit at a tiresome pace. Short of waiting for the HSK3.0 books to come out, I think this is the only way forward to HSK5. I've now finished both books, a year after buying them, and it was a very tedious and unnecessarily unpleasant journey (which is too bad since I was really excited after I passed HSK4) but I do feel my reading, writing and listening skills have improved significantly.

I haven’t used this yet, but I like the series. This book was a bit scuffed up and the first 2 or so pages were stuck together.

now I have to waste time dealing with the return

No CD included