On this cold Friday afternoon in Beijing, we're pleased to be inside and enjoying the warmth of our feline companions, but even more pleased to announce the release of our newest addition to the Popup family: our downloadable HSK training software. This is a Windows application that will allow you to prepare for the HSK (the Chinese proficiency test) regardless of whether you are online or offline. Air travel just got more bearable.

So if you're preparing for the HSK or want to know how good your Chinese really is, we recommend putting this application somewhere prominent on your desktop and firing it up every now and then for a quick run through a gauntlet of multiple choice exercises. Answer as many or as few as you'd like and then continue with your other work. It makes for a great coffee break too.

Why are we doing this when everyone else is forcing users to come online to learn? Primarily because we're listening to your feedback and understand that you can't always be online, and - even if you could - you don't always want to be online. We're committed to making sure you can use all of the great tools and resources we're developing at Popup Chinese wherever and however you like to study. This is a small step in that direction. It should go without saying that we'd love to hear feedback about how we can improve this application for you.

The bad news? Well... we need to support our great test team here in Beijing, so if you want to upgrade this application to take advantage of our huge and growing archive of test data, you'll have to either have a paid subscription, or have paid for one at some point in the past. If either of those conditions hold, you can upgrade with a click of the mouse and really get some muscle behind your offline testing. Otherwise you're welcome to use the application, but will have a more restricted set of questions. We encourage everyone who is taking the HSK to subscribe, if even for one month, so you can take advantage of this tool. Your support will also enable us to continue producing these great study materials, so that you can keep upgrading for new questions.

So what are you waiting for? Get downloading here:

http://popupchinese.com/pages/hsktestsoftware

And Mac users? Don't panic. We expect to have a version ready for you quite soon as well.