Hi guys
Thought I'd let everyone here on Skritter know that I just got the results back from the HSK advanced I did back in October. (For anyone who doesn't know it, it's the official exam for Chinese proficiency. Advanced is the top level.)
And good news is - I passed! Yay! Got a grade C (level 9). Level 11 or A is the top mark, level 10 or B is the next down, C is the minimum grade to pass for advanced level. I was very happy just to pass.
For those who don't know the exam, it's pretty tough. There's a long listening section, long reading section with not much time to answer the questions, a grammar section that had questions that puzzled some of my teachers, an essay of 500 to 700 characters in 30 minutes, and a recorded spoken part where you have to read a passage out loud and answer two open-ended questions.
I was pretty much middling C on all of these apart from the grammar which I got a B on and the listening which I just missed the C grade for by one mark. Can still pass like that though.
Upshot is that I want to give a shout out to the whole Skritter team - I spent 200 hours plus grinding out characters in the year leading up to the exam. You guys rock. I think it's pretty unlikely I would have been able to fire off a 600 character essay in 30 minutes without Skritter.
I also spent a bunch of time on nciku.com (9000 words in my vocab lists now), YellowBridge.com and zhongwen.com (for etymology). I worked through about ten past papers. Did about 15 or so practice essays. I took over 200 hours of one-to-one classes on the internet and with teachers face-to-face in 2009, and about 160 hours total in 2007 and 2008. And got myself anxious by reading about how hard the HSK was at chinese-forums.com.
Sites I got my teachers from: chineseteachers.com, echineselearning.com, imandarinpod.com, chinesetutor.net. If the Skritter team don't mind I can also recommend a teacher I use (based in Spain) for anybody who's interested in taking classes online - just message them. (If they do mind they can edit that bit out :P)
Hope this encourages some learners out there - I've done most but not all of my study for this over the net.
Thanks again Skritter guys :P keep studying everybody else :P