200/200 in HSK1
Early this year, I did something at the age of 34 that I've never ever been able to do in my entire school life. I got a 200/200 in an exam. That too for a foreign language - Mandarin Chinese.
It all started 3 years back tbh when I started dealing with Taiwan resellers in my full-time job. Though I was able to generate $1mn in sales via them, I hated every bit of conversation with them (we had one to two almost every week).
Each meeting took 2X of the time it was supposed to - because in between - they used to keep talking in Mandarin and I used to keep sitting there like for them to wait to finish. This was before GPT had come out with its meeting recording functionality. So - I had this at the back of my mind - that some day - I'm going to start learning the allegedly most difficult language on the planet.
Quite a journey. Started with learning it myself first on Duolingo. I really thought at first that I was going somewhere with it - but it turned out after a couple of months - I'd learned nothing but a few basic vocabulary only. I couldn't speak or form a single sentence like Nǐ jiào shén me míng zi. Duolingo is amazing at engagement, but you don't learn the language imo.
Then, I joined one of the most popular online schools for mandarin first - Meiyu. In all honesty, I just lost track in the middle of the 8 week course. Maybe it was a bit too much for me. The teacher was good - but strict as well. I couldn't keep up and would take the blame on myself than the institution or teacher.
Gave a second attempt at it by trying to find an offline centre. Came across two in bangalore - Yellow River and The Mandarin Story. Yellow river teacher had gone for a vacation and hence I decided to join the mandarin story since the next batch was starting in couple of weeks and it had very good reviews on Google. Moreover - the teacher was Indian - and had her own style of teaching Mandarin relating it to hindi - drawing on the numerous similarities between Mandarin and Hindi.
In a couple of weeks, I started looking forward to the weekend classes and meeting up with my batch-mates in Indiranagar. I took 2 courses - Foundation Course where we practised tones, grammar, sentence structure, a bit of speaking. And then HSK 1, which was a bit more intense and focused more on sentence formations along with the normal course curriculum.
Post the 2 month course, I was quite confident that I can ace HSK 1 examination. Flew to bombay to give it and kept practising all chapters every now and then for a month's time. The results were delayed but finally came out and I got a 200/200. This is one of my proudest achievements of 2026 and just wanted to share it here with everyone.
Planning to give HSK 2 in October in Nepal now. Wish me luck :)