If you don't know the pinyin, the Chinese phonetic language, you will always be confused about how to pronounce Chinese. Therefore is a basic requirement that you know Pinyin. If you spend about 2 days in the pronunciation-book, you are already quite well off.
Step 1: Get to Know your Tongue
Focus on your tongue! Feel where your tongue is in your mouth! Move it around while you focus on it! Have a look at the drawings and try to hold your tongue exactly in the way it is shown in the drawings. Read the explanations and start trying to pronounce the letter and the syllables. Listen to the soundfiles. Mimic what you hear!
Step 2: Go Deeper into the Matter
Compare the sounds which sound very similar. Go back and forth between pages and keep on mimicking what you hear.
Step 3: Repeat
Go back to the pronunciation-part every now and then and have a look at what you haven't mastered completely.
If I was you, I would start with the hardest part of the Chinese language: the characters. It is hard work to learn them. Yet, with the mnemonic- and drill-method provided on this website, your learning-process will be astonishinly fast. Your disciplined work will be rewarded by the wonderful experience of you looking at a Chinese-chat-message or a newspaper headline and simply understanding it.
Step 1: Write While You Recite the Mnemonic
You go into the vocabulary-part, read your first menmonic, click on the links to the radicals, learn the stroke order and write your first character. Write every character at least 5 times and repeat the mnemonic while you write the character. Repeat all characters which you have learned when you learn for the second time.
Step 2: Start your Writing- and Mnemonics-Drill
After having gone through 100 characters, which will take you 1 to 2 days, you print the navigation with 100 characters and lay the print on the table besides you. Now, you click on the soundfile, on which you can listen to all 100 mnemonics. This soundfile is your coach which keeps you learning in a concentrated way. While you listen to the soundfile, you write the characters by writing one radical after another. It will take you about 30 minutes to go through all 100 characters in this way. Do this a few times. Do it again on the next day!
Step 3: Stimulate Your Brain-Cells Accoustically Whenever You Can
Download the soundfile with 100 mnemonics and listen to it in the car, the subway or while you go for a stroll. Imagine how you write the character. Take the print of the navigation with you so that you can have a look at the character if you want to see a detail.
Step 4: Start the Fast drill and repeat regularly
Click on the soundfile on which you only hear the pinyin and the basic meaning. Look at one character after another, recite the pinyin and the basic meaning and immediately after that you hear the correct pinyin and the basic meaning from the soundfile. This will only take you about 6 minutes for 100 characters. You should do this every day once. Again, the soundfile is your coach. It keeps you focused on your work.
Lay the navigation-print besides you and make a dot underneath every character whose pinyin or basic meaning you didn't remember in an instant. After having gone through this soundfile, you have a close look at the characters again which you didn't know. Read the mnemonic and write the character a few times! Then you can do a fast repetition again on the next day.
Once you know pinyin and 800 to 1200 characters, you will feel completely different what the Chinese language is concerned. Now, the mystery has gone and you can start learning Chinese as any other language. One easy way is just to memorize sentences! Very simple.
Step 1: Get Acquainted with New Text
You can go the grammar-part and go through all the grammar-lessons. Or you can go to the lesson-part and go through all the lessons. Make all the exercises and repeat everything on the next learning day. Just write the sentences once with Pinyin letters and/or with Chinese letters.
Step 2: Practise Your Listening Skills
Ask a Chinese to tell you any sentence of what you have learned already and you translate it to English.
Step 3: Practise Your Speaking Skills
The Chinese tells you a sentence in English and you translate it and say it in Chinese.
Dont spend too much time on learning vocabulary in an isolated manner! Learn and recite entire sentences until you know them by heart. The vocabulary is rather there to give you a feeling to what the characters meaning can extend.
Needless to say that the more time you invest in learning Chinese, the faster you will be rewarded and the more motivated you will become. You can spend 15 minutes per day. Yet, do it stubbornly disciplined. Or you can spend one hour per day and you will soon be rewarded by your learning-success.
If you really want to move ahead quickly, you spend 4 hours per day. After 4 weeks, you will know between 500 and 800 characters. And after two more weeks, you will know about 1200 characters which means that you are very well off. Play the soundfiles and immerse yourself in mnemonics and in drill!
Most important: Spend only about 1/4 of your time with learning something new. Invest 3/4 of your time in repeating of what you have learned already during the last learning session or the ones before.
And: Please send us a feedback when you realize how fast you have learned something which seemed almost impossible in the beginning. We wish you from our hearts that you will experience great joy while being rewarded by your learning success!