Chinese American here that has foundation in Cantonese as well that took Mandarin during my younger years. If you know Cantonese, I highly recommend practicing

Chinese American here that has foundation in Cantonese as well that took Mandarin during my younger years. If you know Cantonese, I highly recommend practicing the phonetics instead of words for a bit (like during a car ride or something). When I first learned Mandarin, we were drilled BoPoMoFo since it is a phonetic based system even when they taught primarily PinYin. It helps a lot with word enunciation in the future.