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The 36th Chamber of the HSK Exam
Monday, April 18, 2005-9:53 AM
The 1978 Shaw Brothers film The 36th Temple of Shaolin inspired me to start a rigorous training program for the HSK exam.
Shortly before the movie began on Saturay, Natasha lodged a protest against watching it.
"My father wouldn't even watch this kind of movie."
We watched it anyway. It's about a young rebel late in the Qing (Manchu) dynasty who works his way through the various chambers of the Shaolin Temple's rigourous martial arts training regiment.
Each chamber presents the student with a new and dangerous training method that the student must master before proceeding. As the legendary University of Wisconsin African Storytelling Professor Harold Scheub would tell you, "Look for the pattern. The pattern tells the story."
What is the pattern? The young student enters a new chamber, attempts the challenge, fails, gets frustrated, gains enlightenment, succeeds, and moves to the next chamber. Using this formula, the movie feeds the audience's imagination with different kinds of training methods the monks in the Shaolin Temple might have used to train their pupils.
This movie made me take a renewed interest in preparing for the HSK exam in May.
Yesterday I took part of a practice HSK exam Natasha dug up on the Internet. As anyone who has taken the HSK exam or looked at practice material for the exam knows, one common type of question is the where-does-this-word-fit-into-the-sentence question. An English question of this variety might look like this:
The (A) monkey (B) with the telephone ate (C) the banana (D) without laughing. (again)
The test taker needs to find the correct spot (A,B,C, or D) for the word at the end, in this case "again".
I couldn't think straight after reading 30 questions like this. But the Shaw Brothers film should motivate me to study harder.
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