• People are saying immersion is absolutely necessary - after a year or two of classes, go to china for a few months.. twice.
• Start with the John DeFrancis series then transition into basic elementary school texts
• Work on the issues listed in Chinese language support for Ubuntu. I desperately need to have the proper pinyin numbering and full character list!
• How can having a learning partner be taken advantage of? What things can be done together other than mutual reinforcement.
• Get a dictionary: English -> (Simplified Chinese + Pinyin)

• Get a dictionary: Simplified Chinese -> English

  • Must be very organized, with multiple table of contents, including stroke order and Pinyin.

• Begin a vocabulary "leech book"

https://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/10/14/how-to-learn-fluent-mandarin-chinese/

Carry a vocabulary "leech book" with you at all times, and leech 10-15 words and phrases a day from people you speak with, on top of the words and phrases you pick up from your textbooks. Review the words and phrases you've learned whenever you've got a bit of downtime (e.g. on the bus, waiting in line). If you stick with this program, you'll learn four thousand or more words and phrases in context over the course of a year.

To do this, you'll need to learn some form of romanization as soon as possible. My personal favorite is Yale romanization, but Pinyin works well too. See https://pinyin.info/ for a number of excellent tools that will help you learn romanization.

As for learning zhuyin, or BoPoMoFo, it is necessary to read zhuyin for several reasons, but I don't think it is necessary to learn to write zhuyin. You'll learn zhuyin in your classes, or you can learn it online very quickly.

• Explore software

  • I've heard poor reviews of Rosetta Stone.
• Study comedy in Chinese. Intricacies of the language could make this interesting.
• Two people, one only speaking English and the other only Chinese, could be useful for teaching others as a pair.

• Comedy/acting "scenes", skits and rants as tools in teaching.

• The method Chinese use for learning English is to take an English word and break it down into syllables. For each syllable, try to match it with a Chinese word. This is why their English is halting/stuttering. This is a terrible way to learn a language, and it gives an awful accent. It's for this reason that I don't want to closely associate pinyin words with anything in English. It's a habit that would need to be broken later. It's best not to develop the habit in the first place.