What is the ETA on the Reading practice, and how will it work? Is it just going to be incorporated in regular practice and will prompt us with a character where we have to input the pinyin or will it be an actual text or sentence or what? I am confused

I'm part of the way through with it. Not sure how much, since I'm not done yet. Been fixing bugs and such recently instead. But it shouldn't be too much longer--before the next newsletter on the 15th.

It's going to operate on the same words you already have, where you type the pinyin for the word and it takes that and grades the individual components to figure out what you know. So you can get some of the tones and some of the individual characters' pinyins wrong and some right, as well as scheduling the whole word's reading and tone.

Will we be typing toneless pinyin or tone numbers? (I wouldn't want to bother with trying to type the diacritics.) Or maybe we'll have an option?

Is it meant to replace the "self-grading reading practice" where the character / word is shown and you grade yourself or is it just a supplement?

I'd hope a supplement, after all it's meant to focus on pronunciation rather than definition... And besides, the current definition prompt is very speedy. That I like!

Oh I used current definition for both definition and pinyin recollection. Does anyone know does it collect recall data for both or just definition?

Actually thinking about it now it most likely just affects definition...

The current definition practice is intended to be used just for definition recall, although you could use it for both if you want. This one will be aimed at pinyin + tones. So you'll type pinyin with tone numbers, yeah, like ni3hao3 or li4zi5.

There is a reading practice for Japanese that's just self-grading. If this works out, we may soon replace it with an active mode.

Can we make the reading practice like a separate practice option? I'm thinking how annoying it might get if I'm using my tablet to write characters and have to keep putting it down and picking it up in order to type pinyin. Maybe make it like the cram page, where I can work on just the reading practice? :)

You would be able to manually turn reading practice on and off, if you wanted to really separate the modes. Other than that, I'm planning on grouping prompts by input type so that you only have to switch between keyboard and mouse/pen every 10 words or so.