I've been learning chinese for about a year now. I use chinesepod for vocabulary, realisitic dialog and small doses of grammar. I deconstruct the podcasts int

I've been learning chinese for about a year now. I use chinesepod for vocabulary, realisitic dialog and small doses of grammar. I deconstruct the podcasts into a form where I painstakingly repeat the entire dialog piece-wise at a slower speed until my pronounciation is good. Using audacity to label regions of the dialog and praat to pick out pitches, it's possible to get a very precise view of how the tones are being pronounced. (praat is opensource too). I use skritter to work on learning the characters imported from the lessons at chinesepod (they have an interoperability agreement) I watch a live streaming weather channel from beijing, and another channel out of nanjing. Since the connections are spotty, I have $mplayer -dump the stream straight to file, and then play from that. This endows mplayer the ability to seek, and of course plays much smoother without the cache issues. Use IRC. Typing the language is great practice and native speakers can offer helpful advice. Staying motivated is the hardest part, prevent burn out any way possible. Use automation when it makes sense, though It's easy to spend too much time messing with tools to learn, rather than learning.