A streak is not progress

XP measures that you tapped something. It does not measure whether you heard 四十 (sì shí, forty) and 十四 (shí sì, fourteen) with no caption. A correct multiple-choice tap is recognition. The ear has to recover the tone with no gloss on screen.

Duolingo’s Chinese course page sells bite-sized lessons, points, and habit. That job is real. It is not a listening score. It is not retrieval either: tapping “thank you” next to 谢谢 (xièxie, thank you) is not saying it at a counter.

The written HSK, in the six-level design, scores listening, reading, and writing as separate blocks. Registration lives on chinesetest.cn. CLEC coordinates international Chinese teaching. Neither of them examines you with XP or a flame.

Wikipedia’s HSK page summarises the classic bands: about 150, 300, 600, 1,200, 2,500, and 5,000 words from HSK 1 to 6. Classic HSK 1 is about 150. This site’s public vocabulary lists 12,432. That figure is not the paper. Climbing XP “toward the 12,432” is catalog tourism.

The HSK guides describe the syllabus by level. XP does not. If your point graph climbs and 四 still sounds like 十, the graph is lying. Mark it wrong. Not “almost”.

A Sunday lesson binge inflates the bar. Monday the ear is cold. That is not a retention percentage. It is the same problem as cramming: packed activity, a long gap. Cepeda and colleagues, in Psychological Bulletin (2006), “Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks,” compared spaced and massed practice on verbal recall. The qualitative conclusion is enough: spacing beats the binge. The paper is at doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354. Do not invent a memory percentage from that study.

Measure three things. Active words: you retrieve them, you do not just recognise them. Listening on the first pass: one play of the audio, then you mark. Three recorded sentences: the same set on Friday and on Monday.

That does not fit in a flame. It fits on paper. Every Friday, four boxes. You do not need a stats URL.

One: you hear 四 and 十, and 四十 against 十四, without looking at the hanzi. If you swap them, you did not “level up” that week. You cut the new-card cap.

Two: the due queue is not a red wall. If every morning is a fire, you added too many new cards or marked “good” while unsure. Queue size is a signal. XP is not.

Three: you say 我要这个 (wǒ yào zhège, I want this) with no pinyin in front of you. If you need the romanisation, the word is still passive.

Four: Friday’s recording against Monday’s. Same three sentences. If Monday the tone drops or a syllable vanishes, the weekend did not hold. Saturday’s XP does not enter that comparison.

The four boxes fit in a notebook. Monday, coffee, one minute. If you miss two or more, do not open another points app. Cut new cards and pay the queue. The forgetting mechanism is in the SRS post. Here you only measure whether the gap got shorter.

Paper does not replace the queue. The queue tells you which cards are due. The paper tells you whether ear and mouth survived the night. If you only do one of those two, you are measuring habit again. Copy the four lines onto a sheet and leave it by the coffee. Do not open the app to “see if you went up”. Open the queue. Mark the paper after.

An active word is one you go and fetch. You see a price, hear “sì”, and write 四. Or someone asks for “this one”, and 这个 (zhège, this) comes out with no list. A seen word is one you tapped in a lesson. The brain tags “I have seen this”. The exam and the street ask for the other kind.

Recognising 买 (mǎi, to buy) with three glosses underneath is not knowing 买. Retrieving 买 against 卖 (mài, to sell) is. The pair flattens if you only ever saw them together on a list. Mark it active when you pull it with no model. Not when it “rings a bell”.

Count badly: “I have seen 400 hanzi”. Count well: “these 20 I retrieve on the first try, with tone”. Classic HSK 1 is about 150. If 40 of those 150 are active, that is a number. If your app says 400 seen, that is a catalog.

How to test it off the app: close the screen. Someone says the English gloss. You say the syllable, the tone, and the hanzi. Or the other way: you see the hanzi and you say the sound. If you stall, it is not active. “Almost” is passive with better marketing.

Do not mix the 12,432-word inventory with the 150-word paper. The catalog is for looking things up. It is not a progress trophy. Progress is 四 that no longer flattens into 十, and 我要这个 that comes out with no pinyin.

If you want the mechanism (interval, queue, Anki), go back to why you forget Chinese words. This post only asks for an honest count: active, not seen.

Listening on the first pass means one play. You start the audio. You write or say what you heard. Then you look. If you hit repeat four times before you risk an answer, you are measuring patience, not an ear.

The HSK paper does not give you an infinite loop. HSK 1 and 2 show pinyin on the written test. The audio still runs at exam speed, not at “one more time” speed. Train the first pass. The second pass is study, not measurement.

Messy test: 四 and 十 in a price or a date, with no text. If you miss the tone, that syllable’s card goes back to wrong. Do not turn the volume up and pass yourself.

Another item: 多少钱 (duōshao qián, how much is it?). If you only recognise it in writing, it is not in the ear. One pass. If it lands, good. If not, wrong, and into the queue.

Do not use Chinese and English subtitles together when you are measuring. That is reading. For study, a crutch is fine. For measurement, the audio runs alone.

Five minutes of listening in the 20-minute study routine is enough if it is a first pass. Twenty minutes of video with translation does not replace that box. The official exam does not score your replays.

Three sentences. Not thirty. You record them Friday on your phone. You hear them Monday without looking at the text. If Monday they sound worse, the weekend streak did not hold output.

Start with an HSK 1 set. 我要这个. 多少钱. 谢谢. Same three. Do not swap the set every day or you have nothing to compare.

No pinyin on screen while you speak. If you need it, the sentence is not yours yet. Friday you can miss the tone. The useful datum is Monday: better, the same, or worse?

Do not score “native accent”. Score three ugly things: the syllable came out, the tone came out, the sentence was understandable. If 我要这个 sounds flat, the tone is not there. Mark it.

A recording is not an HSKK oral exam. Speaking sits off the written paper. You only want a test XP cannot fake. The voice file does not add points. That is why it works.

If Monday is the same or better, keep the cap. If it is worse, new cards to zero until the three sentences survive a night. That hurts more than losing a flame. It is the only fix that does not lie.

Do not measure the streak. Measure whether you came back. Coming back matters for habit. It does not replace 四 by ear.

Do not measure XP, gems, leagues, or hearts. Those are designed to make you open the app. They are not designed for the language.

Do not measure “words seen”, “lessons completed”, or the 12,432-word catalog. The HSK 1 paper is about 150. Finishing a unit does not turn seen words into active ones. The owl, as Does Duolingo work for the HSK? argues, is a warm-up once you have a test date.

Do not measure minutes on screen. Ten honest queue minutes beat an hour of taps. The clock lives in the routine. The quality test lives here.

Do not hunt a public numbers page. What you see after you sign in is not material for Google. The next step that can be linked is to sign in and look at the queue, plus the four-box paper.

Do not measure “days in a row” on two apps at once. Two flames are two debts. Pick one queue. The rest is noise that looks like discipline.

Do not invent a retention percentage. Cepeda 2006 does not give you yours. Your weekly paper does: four boxes, yes or no.

There is no public stats page that deserves a link. The work after this article is to sign in, look at the due queue, and copy the four boxes onto paper.

Chinese Trainer builds that queue by HSK band, with listening and writing in the same account. The product map is in what’s inside the app. HSK 1-2 is free. The CTA is one: sign in and check today’s queue.

On paper this week: 四 against 十 by ear. A queue that is not a red wall. 我要这个 with no pinyin. Three Friday sentences against Monday. If one box fails, you do not make it up with an extra points lesson. You repeat that item the next day, first pass, no gloss. XP does not enter the notebook. If all four hold, the points can stay noise. If they fail, the noise was the progress you thought you had.

Pinyin is the official romanization of Mandarin. Hanzi are the written Chinese characters. HSK is Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi. Reviewed by Javier Garcia Floriano. About us. Contact.

• Apply one method today, not a second streak.
• Measure one pair or one mock, not XP.
• Use the single CTA on this page.