What country/language has the hardest proficiency exam? Basically, what's the hardest proficiency exam on earth?

I was thinking about this... in Chinese, most people aim for HSK5 (there are 6 levels), because that's the level people say you need to be able to work here... that sad truth is that this is woefully inadequate, and even HSK 6 (5k words total, around 2k characters if I remember correctly) is still woefully inadequate. Of course this really depends on what sort of work one wants to do, but there's absolutely no way one could go from passing HSK6 to say, a masters program purely in Chinese.

On the flip side, I remember hearing that Japan had some really brutal tests for people who wanted to work there (the context I was told was this was for foreign nurses, specifically Philipinos, to work in Japan). I've been told the N1 exam is a more accurate test of "could you work here" than HSK6.

I don't really know much about other language exams, but I'm curious if there are any that are notoriously hard. This is all relatively speaking, of course, so I imagine there are two answers: one would be that a given exam is really hard for a native english speaker to get to, but another is that even taking that into account, a given exam is particularly difficult. This is because the HSK6 for example is a pretty tough exam for most language learners, it's just woefully inadequate because, well, you need a lot of words to exist here and learning all of the characters etc is rough.

submitted by /u/onthelambda
[link] [comments]

from Ontitokaaha | Languagelearning https://ift.tt/2IuKziB
via Learn Online English Speaking