I was interviewed this week by the very nice people at PythonAnywhere: blog.pythonanywhere.com/79/ . They do a great job of hosting my hanzi analysis scripts, and allow you to create and maintain a site run by the Python language without any configuration, or uploading or downloading anything- you edit the code through a very advanced web editor. You can create a free account to try it out. The code runs on Amazon's EC2 servers, so the performance is quite amazing.

Thes hanzi tools I created do all sorts of things that are too numerous to list, give them a try here: hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com . I made a small improvement to the dictionary today, so that it copes with large amounts of input better. It shows a short phrase word by word, and annotates a longer phrase inline (recognise the poem?)

OK so maybe the title goes a bit far; it might be more accurate to say "Where people are studying for the HSK" or "Where visitors to my website are from". But there's probably a pretty strong correlation between places where my site is popular, and where people are learning Chinese.

This map combines together country-level and city-level data, and it's pretty clear that most of the learners are from China (18%), Thailand (8%), and Indonesia (7%)! In Western Europe there is a fairly even spread of learners everywhere (except for a gap in central France!), without too much clustering. I wonder if this matches with more formal studies of the popularity of Chinese as a second language?

Splitting the data by 'region', shows that about 60% of the visits to my site are from Asia, 20% are from Europe, and less than 10% are from North America. There are more visits from S.E. Asia than from E. Asia (which includes China)!

A quick summary of how Google split the regions:'

• Western Asia' is what I would call the 'Middle East',
• Central Asia is all the 'Stans,
• Southern Asia is Iran to India,
• South-East Asia is Burma and Thailand to the Philippines and Indonesia.
• East Asia is China, Mongolia, Japan, Korea.
  
• Northern Europe is the UK and Scandanavia.
• Western Europe is Germany and France to Switzerland.

I'm not sure if there's much point to this one, but just in case someone ever needs it- here's a page that lists all Chinese homophones, with a page for each word length: http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/homophones

I am defining homophones as words with identical pinyin. You can choose whether or not tones should be ignored by selecting the appropriate option.

Just added a quick feature to my growing little dictionary/HSK list browsing script that allows you to see the characters for each (or multiple) HSK level(s) grouped by character and all ordered by frequency. Check it out here: http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/radicals?hsk=14

I have seen this question asked a few times, so here's the best answer I am able to give.

• I have collected together and added English for some example sentences that demonstrate grammatical points for the HSK 1, HSK 2, and HSK 3. These example sentences can also be downloaded as flashcard files for use in software such as Pleco and StickyStudy.
  
• The excellent AllSet Learning Grammar Wiki has a page that classifies the grammatical points on the site into 6 levels. These seem to correspond roughly to the six HSK levels, so it would be a good idea to ensure you are familiar with the grammatical points in the appropriate levels.
• Another post on this site shows the contents page of the great grammar book Common Chinese Patterns 330 by Qin Xue Herzberg. I have classified the patterns by HSK level, and there are popup tooltips with information about the characters. The best way to use this list is to study the appropriate patterns from the book.
• The sample exams at the official HSK site chinesetest.cn has quite a few sample exams for each level; doing all of the exams is great practice at seeing the different ways grammatical points can occur.
• Some other grammar books that I own that are useful but don't have any information on the HSK level of each point specifically are: Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar by Chen Ru, Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar by Claudia Ross, Schaum's Outline of Chinese Grammar by Claudia Ross.
• These sites don't have much information on their suitability for HSK levels, but are a great resources:  Chinese Grammar by Hugh Grigg (who also has an awesome  blog), Oxford University's grammar notes, and these basic review slides at Rutgers are a great way to start.
• The HSK grammar books I have found tend to be focused on the 'Old' HSK, and so they might not match the New HSK too well. I have listed a few in case you are willing to try them (I haven't) Practising HSK Grammar by Zhang Jing, Essentials of HSK Grammar by Zhao Jing, HSK Grammar by Fu Yuping, Brushing Up Your Grammar for HSK by Dong Cui, HSK Grammar Guidebook by Han Zhigang
  
• I would love to find some more good books and resources for studying Chinese grammar- let me know if you have any suggestions

My HSK list browsing script took a step closer to being a real dictionary. I added:

• Pinyin (tones optional) search, no wildcards yet
• English (definition) search
• All of the searches are done from the same edit field, very few things will match both English and pinyin, if they do you'll get 
  
• Greying out of words/chars that only have frequency information and no dictionary entries
• Added pinyin and definitions to the tooltip text for all characters/words.
• Colouring of links to HSK list pages

And it's still lighting fast, and as before shows CC-CEDICT definitions, character composition, and word compounds. Give it a try 现在! http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/cidian?q=%E7%8E%B0%E5%9C%A8

I am changing my DNS servers; the main site should be unaffected, but there may be problems accessing files on either https://github.com/glxxyz/hskhsk.com/tree/main/data or https://github.com/glxxyz/hskhsk.com/tree/main/data, depending where you are in the world. If one of those fails for you then try the other, or if both fail use this link and browse to your file, which should be guaranteed to work : https://github.com/glxxyz/hskhsk.com/tree/main/data.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

A few people have asked me this by email, so here's the answer I gave them:

• A quick way to get an idea is to look at a description of ability of learners at different HSK levels, and see where you think your level is.
• If you have a list of the vocabulary you know (e.g. flashcards) and would like to know your HSK level you can enter paste your vocabulary into this script: http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/hanzi
• If you don't have a vocab list, the the best to determine your level is to try some of the online or downloadable HSK sample exams from the official website: http://www.chinesetest.cn/
• You can get a rough idea of your level by looking at the vocabulary lists here, click the 'expand definitions' link too see the meanings: http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/hskwords
• There is also an 'HSK Test' here but I have no idea if it works: http://popupchinese.com/hsk/test
• Let me know if there are any other resources out there for finding your HSK level!
  

Remember, to really 'know' an HSK word you have to be able to use it in all of the different ways that Hanban expects you to. See my recent posts on HSK 1, HSK 2, and HSK 3 example sentences.

These HSK 3 example sentences demonstrate the different ways that some HSK 1 words can be used. See my other posts for HSK 1 and HSK 2 example sentences.The first 70 hanzi sentences (to which I added pinyin and English) were taken from the HSK information published by Hanban on www.chinesetest.cn . The rest were created by me to demonstrate the way that specific words (highlighted with 『』square brackets) are used. They are also available as a flashcard text file for HSK levels 1-3. Please share any more examples that you have in the comments. 94 sentences are with hanzi, pinyin, and English are shown after the jump!

These HSK 2 example sentences demonstrate the different ways that some HSK 2 words can be used. See my other posts for HSK 1 and HSK 3 examples. They are taken from the HSK information published by Hanban on www.chinesetest.cn . They are also available as a flashcard text file for HSK levels 1-3. Please share any more examples that you have in the comments. 53 sentences are with hanzi, pinyin, and English are shown after the jump!