Before I sign up for Chinesepod or popup Chinese or some such, I was wondering if there was any plans for exams on Skritter. Fill in the blank, multiple choice, etc. Since its the only program that emphasizes writing, would it be possible to integrate stuff that goes beyond words or chengyu. I know the sample sentences are fill-in-the-blank, but maybe you could give us the option to create our own exams and share them (the sample sentences tend to be a little too.. esoteric for me to understand whats going on). Anything like that in the works?

And yes, I do hope for mock HSK's in the future, this is just a first step to my ultimate goal!

I don't work for Skritter but I would bet an answer from someone that does would go something like this: Those are all really great ideas we've thought of as well! We definitely want to implement changes like that in the future, but right now we are working on several different projects (like the iPhone app) so features like those you are mentioning will hopefully be here eventually but not anytime soon.

Good answer, joshwhitson13! Yes, we do have our hands full right now.

We do have some plans to upgrade the example sentences to get a bunch more simpler ones and allow user submissions and voting on them, but that won't be for a while.

I don't think we will do exams, though--too far away from our main focus.

Then what about writing sentences down the road? Would it be possible to tell your study list to, say, have you write out a sample sentence if each of the characters is already in your queue?

Perhaps you've already caught these, but this site has a web-based practice test for all levels of the new HSK:

http://www.chinesetesting.cn/gosimexam.do

This website has PDF's practice tests which you could print and then use the supplementary MP3's to actually take the test:

http://www.confuciusinstitute.qut.edu.au/study/proficiency.jsp

Easiest to add the sentences to your studies like MasterOfComboBoxes suggests in this thread: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=66996245

Adding those sentences automatically will have to wait until we do more work on the sentence system. But you can try doing some manually now and see how well you like it.