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This book is intended for Western students of the Chinese language who wish to take the Chinese language proficiency exam (Hànyu Shuipíng Kaoshì, HSK) either for academic reasons when planning to enroll for studies at a university in Mainland China or for any other professional or personal reasons.
This book contains lists of vocabulary and Chinese characters that students are required to know for the six different levels of the HSK exam. It is intended as a reference guide to essential vocabulary and Chinese characters as well as to the grammar aspects that will be requested within the exam in one of the various ways of the communicative tasks assigned to the candidate. This book should be used in conjunction with the official monolingual textbooks available for each level of the HSK exam as a guide of bilingual reference throughout the preparation process for the exam at each proficiency level.

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Muhammad Schmidt was born in 1950. He graduated in Linguistics, Chinese and African Studies, Language Pedagogy and Comparative Religion/Theology, made his Ph.D. in Chinese Studies (Sinology) and post-doc degree (Habilitation) from universities in Germany, the USA and China.
In Korea, South and East Africa and China he gave Linguistic and Chinese Language classes. At first he did this as a Lecturer, later as Associate and Full Professor. The author published numerous research works, textbooks and interactive digital language learning programmes for Swahili, Chinese and English.
Schmidt retired in June 2015 from the active professional life in the academic world. In January 2015 his well-known annotated German translation of the oldest Chinese classic on acupuncture was re-published by Viademica Publishers in Berlin (4. ed., ISBN 978-3-939290-81-0).

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