I passed HSK5 with 270 out of 300 while studying Computer Science — entirely in English.
My degree had nothing to do with Chinese. No immersion semester, no preparatory year, no 1+4 program. I was a CS student whose entire academic life was conducted in English, which is my third language, and I decided to pursue Chinese on the side. That context matters, because it shaped every decision I made about how to study.
HSK5 is not a beginner-friendly exam. It covers around 2,500 vocabulary items (I ended up with 4,059 vocab elements, counting idioms), requires you to write structured essays under time pressure, and includes listening passages at native conversational speed. The difficulty isn't any single component — it's that the components compound. Weak vocabulary limits your reading speed. Weak listening comprehension tanks your score on a section you can't pause or reread. I had no classroom, no tutor, and no one checking whether I was actually learning or just going through the motions.
The thing I kept coming back to was that the goal wasn't to pass the test — the test was just a measurement. The goal was to actually use the language. That reframe changed what I spent time on.
Vocabulary
For vocabulary, I made my own flashcard decks in Pleco rather than using premade ones. Building the cards forced an interaction with each word before I'd tested myself on it, which meant better recall later. I also stopped treating unknown vocabulary in workbook reading sections as something to skip past — I wrote it down, found the sentence it lived in, and came back to it. Context-anchored words stick in a way that isolated glossary entries don't.
Listening
For listening, I used 抖音 — but deliberately. The algorithm personalises quickly, and if you keep your consumption to native-produced content, you end up absorbing several real phrases a day without it feeling like study. I combined this with podcasts for passive listening during commutes, and occasional real conversations via online language exchange partners. Not everyone has native-speaking friends. Online exchange communities can be surprisingly consistent.
Speaking
For speaking, I did a lot of chorusing and shadowing — repeating sentences from recordings, both in sync and after a pause. This sounds tedious and it is, but it builds something that vocabulary drilling doesn't: the automatic retrieval that lets you produce sentences without consciously constructing them word by word.
Writing
For the writing section specifically, I worked through 《25天攻克新HSK5级写作》, which gave me essay structures and idioms I could adapt across different topic types. I kept my own list. Knowing ten flexible sentence structures is worth more than memorising fifty idioms you can't deploy under pressure.
AI as a tutor
I also used AI constantly — for sentence correction, for generating example sentences in native context, for essay feedback. Not as a shortcut but as a patient tutor available at any hour.
The bigger picture
The goal was not only to get a high score or to learn the language, but to do it while preserving a high level of performance in other areas — academics, sport, career, health, personal life, relationships. Most people told me you can only have a couple of these at the same time. My goal was always to prove them wrong.
People in my surrounding who took courses with professional tutors ended up barely passing HSK4. Others who had already been studying in Chinese for multiple years had trouble getting an above-average grade. The problem is not talent. The problem is having a system, and the utilisation of all the free resources that are available to you.
What I'd tell someone in the same situation — studying in English, unrelated major, doesn't matter whether you're in China — daily effort will get you where you couldn't have imagined.