If you've studied Chinese, you quickly discover that many students don't follow the HSK beyond HSK4. It seems a lot give up, or at least, find some private method to continue their studies. There seems to be some kind of threshold around the HSK4 level, and encountering fellow students beyond that level is rare.
I'm wondering if this is unique to Chinese, or also applies to other Asian languages, especially Japanese, since it's similar in difficulty to Chinese (and share Hanzi/Kanji).
Question: Many Chinese students don't continue past the intermediate level (~HSK4); do other Asian languages have this same phenomenon?
