Your Chinese thread's too old to reply to, sadly. But as another learner of many languages: check out "Colloquial Chinese: by Ping-cheng T’ung and David E. Poll

Your Chinese thread's too old to reply to, sadly. But as another learner of many languages: check out "Colloquial Chinese: by Ping-cheng T’ung and David E. Pollard. (Not newer versions by other authors!) It covers the language only in Pinyin, covering the core grammar etc. very quickly, and giving you big dialogs with a lot of vocabulary. If you work hard with it, (ignoring introductory time figuring out the sound system) a month with 2-3 hours a day will give you about 3000 words of vocabulary and a good handle on the language. While the structure of Chinese is very simple, besides getting used to the phonetics, the writing system constitutes the majority difficulty of the language (but very helpful to understand a lot of complex vocabulary, due to its composition) so ignoring it first will help a lot. The normal Chinese textbooks will cover as much material as this small book in 4-5 volumes, intended for multiple years of university classes. To then learn how to read: The books "The Most Common Radicals" and then "Rapid Literacy in Chinese" are amazing. ("Intensive Spoken Chinese" is meant to be done first, but the Colloquial book is better in my opinion.) I covered these two books in about 40 hours. Then use various readers like "A new China. Intermediate reader of modern Chinese" by Chou Chih-ping, Chiang J., Eagar J or read forums, checking what each character/group of them is in the dictionary to build vocabulary.