Ask yourself why.

1. For financial advantage/business opportunity? Don’t. There was a study I saw (which I can’t find now) which compared the cost of reaching fluency (based on State Department estimates for how many hours of study required), compared with the economic benefits of having “fluent in mandarin” on a resume, and it was a net negative for Chinese. The most effective language to learn for native English speakers (economic/compensation advantage to knowing the language, divided by cost of language acquisition) is Norwegian. There aren’t many people who speak both, it’s close to English, and the Norwegian economy is bumpin'. To add, various Chinese policies (such as the 51% joint venture/IP sharing, and Government preference for local operations) make it difficult for foreigners to make a lot of money in business in China.

2. For intellectual curiosity / linguistic interest: Awesome. Mandarin is very differently structured from English, but still similarly comprehensible to the human brain, so seeing how it works is cool. And you don’t need to spend years studying the language to learn these basic concepts.

3. To get fluent: Be prepared to commit a lot of time to it, time which you could spend learning or studying other things. There are tips and tricks but no silver bullet - you need to commit the time.

4. To better understand friends/colleagues from a Chinese background: Awesome. It’s been cool to break out of my Westerner defaults, and see things from an outside perspective, or from a different center of what is “normal”. Plus, being able to correctly pronounce a lot of coworkers' names is a ninja skill.

How I spent about 3.5 years studying Mandarin.

1. One intensive year in college (class for an hour 5 days a week, two tests weekly). Note: this year we learned to write traditional characters, which made it harder, but also made it easier to later navigate Hong Kong and Taiwan. By the end of this year we were comfortable with basic sentences. Most of the classes were small group settings where the teachers would rapid fire questions at us in Mandarin and we had to respond. For instance, to learn numbers or the family tree, the teacher would be like “Madelaine, your brother is cute, what’s his phone number?” and I would be like “…jiu…yao…si…” etc.
2. Nine weeks in an immersive summer program in Beijing. Five hours of class a day, test every day, we did a year’s worth of classes in eight weeks. The most important part was the immersion. We signed a pledge to not speak any language besides Mandarin for the duration of the program. By the end, most of us were dreaming in Mandarin. Immersion is definitely a fast track to fluency. If you want to get fluent and you can commit to a 24/7 immersion program, do it. Language ability from beginning to end of summer had the most rapid growth.
3. Another intensive year in college. Got my language citation (a minor) and moved on.
4. Study abroad in Hong Kong at CUHK. I took some mandarin classes, but most of the time I spoke English. I did travel around Mainland China a bunch with friends of mine studying abroad at 北大, and those experiences did way more for my Mandarin ability than any classroom study.
5. Travelled around mainland China and Taiwan various times.

Would I learn it again?

It was a fun intellectual exercise. I made some amazing friends. I had some crazy travel experiences, where I got to travel places in China many folks would never have access to because you can’t navigate there if you don’t speak Mandarin. I get along with Chinese friends and colleagues better. But, studying the language was a lot of time I had to commit to it, and it’s hard to justify in retrospect.

How I would recommend you learn it

1. Start with pronunciation. Drill in tones, be able to hear and speak the difference between the pinyin ’s', ‘x’, and ‘sh’, or ‘q’ and ‘ch’. Get a native speaker to ruthlessly correct you if you can.
2. For writing, learn stroke order first - it will make all subsequent writing easier. Practice writing drills - write each character you learn ten times, with correct stroke order, until stroke order is easy for you.
3. Anki/spaced repetition flashcards for characters/pinyin pronunciation/meaning. Basically the Fluent Forever method.
4. Standard textbook stuff - Read some short passages, look up the characters for the vocab, understand how grammar works in context.
5. Lots of conversational practice with a native speaker who will correct you once you get some basic vocab/sentences in.

Tools

1. When learning a new word or phrase, I always go on MDBG.net to break it down into characters and see what they mean individually. If it’s a new character, I break it down into radicals to see what they mean / how they’re pronounced.

2. I’ve used Pleco as an iPhone app to look up characters by writing them and it works well.

3. I’ve since read the book Fluent Forever and it confirmed a lot of what I experienced re: language learning. I’d recommend it.

Mental tricks to help

Characters are more like Latin roots than words. A character can represent a particular concept (or concepts), but doesn’t make much sense until you combine it with other characters to form a word.

Radicals are like letters. If you had to memorize 10,000 characters, and they were all unique, that would be terrible. But, if you only need to memorize a few hundred radicals, and then memorize various combinations of those radials, it’s much faster and more tractable.

Retaining Fluency

I’ve been asked how well I’ve retained my Chinese fluency.

My proficiency definitely wanes when not in practice but comes back quickly. After about a week in a country, I’m almost fluent again, and two weeks and I’m solid. This also holds for Spanish, which I learned in middle/high school. Especially for core vocab and grammar. Niche terms I only learned once or twice are more of a struggle. It also comes back faster if I’m traveling solo or with other enthusiastic speakers of the language, rather than traveling with non-speakers.

My brain can be proficient in one foreign language at a time, and as I’ve traveled to Spanish-speaking or Chinese-speaking countries, one of those languages gets pushed out. Often, I’ll have the situation of struggling to say a sentence in Spanish and trying not to say the mandarin words for things, but then a mandarin word will pop in anyway. (“Estoy…tratando de…shuo…err I mean hablar en español!").

No Silver Bullet

The main takeaway I have for you is that there is no silver bullet to learning to speak, write, read, or listen to mandarin. I went through one of the most intensive language programs of whose existence I am aware. The others in this program were intelligent, motivated, and good at learning. We had time and energy to focus on the task, and it still took even the most capable of us multiple years to get to a point of relative mastery. The State Department estimates 88 weeks, or 2200 class hours, to become proficient in Mandarin Chinese as a native English speaker.

If you do want to learn Mandarin Chinese, and as quickly as possible, I would recommend an immersion program where you have to interact with native speakers to accomplish basic life tasks.