@appapp,

Maybe others can chime in with their experiences here, but what we see that tends to work is when people focus first on listening and then move on to speaking and eventually reading and writing. This preference is very consciously incorporated in our site design. We don't place a huge emphasis on teaching the tones from day one because we find that people pick it up intuitively when they listen to *real* spoken Chinese (i.e. the natural inflective speech in our recordings, not the sort of thing you find in many beginner textbooks).

In contrast, the people who make the slowest progress seem to be those who focus on building an intellectual framework for understanding Chinese first, but don't put much time into listening to the actual language or trying to speak it. This is why we start teaching grammar at the Elementary level and focus primarily on simple vocabulary and high-frequency phrases at the Absolute Beginner level. It's important to learn Chinese grammar, but we don't think it should distract people from the communicative aspects of the language at the very beginning.

So, like Echo, I'd suggest starting with the Absolute Beginner podcasts here on Popup Chinese. Make sure you have the podcasts and dialogues loaded on your MP3 player, and listen to them repeatedly when you have the chance. Listen to the ones that you like repeatedly - they're meant to be fun and dramatic. Before you know it, the phrases and sentences should start feeling intuitive (you'll hear the first word, and want to complete the sentence). Practice speaking with our generative audio fix and when you're ready to move on to reading and writing start working with the transcripts and character writing worksheets.