Thread: O/A-levels + HSK exams

你们好!
I'd like to know how many characters you have to know before you can do the Chinese O/A-levels in Britain. The reason I'm asking is because for the first time ever, a Dutch secondary school is offering the opportunity to do Chinese. There aren't any official exams yet, so they are planning on using the British O-level exams as the official Dutch one as well, at least until the Dutch one has been produced.
Please, answer!

Jasper

Britain hasn't had O-levels since I was a kiddie .. 1988 or something. Don't you mean GCSEs?

Beh, of course. My father did do O/A-levels, and I don't know any British children, so... But of course I mean GCSE.

Gah, never mind. This forum is dead, and I've found the answer anyway ( http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/LPRU/newsa ... Art501.txt )

GCSE students, who previously had to learn 900 characters, will have to master only 600 under new guidelines agreed this year.

So I'm halfway! Wahey!

For those interested, i.e. me, here are some exams and word-lists for the HSK (hanyu shuiping kaoshi):

http://www.unige.ch/lettres/meslo/chinois/hsk.html
http://hsk.org.cn/Common/moni.asp

And an extremely interesting article, though badly translated:
http://people.netscape.com/ftang/chines ... inese.html

This site offers a free self-test for Chinese character recognition:-

http://www.clavisinica.com/fs-views.html