I’ve mostly been using this app. It gameifies the lessons which makes it engaging, and you can set a daily target of say 20 min. It also has speech recognition and lets you practice pronunciation. After about a year of using it I got to the point where I can carry a basic conversation with people. https://www.superchinese.com/
Reading and writing is definitely the most challenging part, and I find actually practising drawing the characters repeatedly is really important for memorizing them. Good news is that there are a few basic strokes that just get reused in many different combinations. Once you learn those then you can see the patterns in the characters. One way to think about this is that western writing system is one dimensional where you string letters in a line, but Chinese system is two dimensional where each character is composed of a number of subcharacters.
I’ve mostly been using this app. It gameifies the lessons which makes it engaging, and you can set a daily target of say 20 min. It also has speech recognition and lets you practice pronunciation. After about a year of using it I got to the point where I can carry a basic conversation with people. https://www.superchinese.com/
Reading and writing is definitely the most challenging part, and I find actually practising drawing the characters repeatedly is really important for memorizing them. Good news is that there are a few basic strokes that just get reused in many different combinations. Once you learn those then you can see the patterns in the characters. One way to think about this is that western writing system is one dimensional where you string letters in a line, but Chinese system is two dimensional where each character is composed of a number of subcharacters.