I’m sorry to hear about that, but I think this is probably a mix of what I talk about in this article and unrealistic expectations. I really think it’s impossible to reach the level of an educated native speaker in five years, it doesn’t really matter how much time you spend or how talented you are, the amount of especially reading you need to do to reach that level is so vast that I think few adult foreigners have ever done it. I certainly haven’t. I wrote an article some time ago about how to figure how good one’s Chinese is (here), where I talked about this and also wrote some thoughts about my own learning.

Then there are oddities in tests like these, too. I had to take a test for native speakers to show that my pronunciation was good enough, but the test actually doesn’t really test pronunciation, it’s more about knowing difficult words and how they are pronounced. They give you a list of characters, words and sentences and ask you to read them. That’s okay as a check for basic pronunciation, but the problem is that the words are really rare (as in many characters being outside of the 5,000 most common ones). I was a bit lucky because I had spent lots of time in Skritter going through around 5,800 characters and actually knew those I got, but it’s a really unfair way of checking pronunciation. Maybe your test contained similar things, too.

Anyway, while I don’t think it’s realistic to reach C2 or educated native level in five years, I can understand that you’re not very happy with 2+ and 3 for grades if 5 is the maximum. On the other hand, I’m not terribly surprised. I’ve studied both undergraduate and post-graduate courses in linguistics and related subjects in Chinese and while this is really good for listening and reading in these specific areas, it doesn’t really improve your overall level that much unless you also do lots of other studying on the side. When you get to a level where you can do these things, teachers don’t care about your language skills that much and the responsibility for learning is entirely on the student. This problem is not limited to Chinese courses or East Asia either; there are many countries where you can study a language for a decade without being able to actually use it.

Not really! This is not about being good or bad, it’s about your level in relation to what you think it ought to be, regardless if your a beginner or very advanced. 🙂