There is no substitute for interaction with people: classes, skyping with iTalki friends, as much as you can. Watch Chinese TV - there are many shows on YouTube which are great for listening comprehension. I don't know how realistic your 2019 deadline is. It is much harder to define a level of.proficiency in Chinese than in English: the exam grades such as HSK don't really reflect an interesting or useful reality. Chinese is a vast landscape with indistinct features which are hard to map, and the learning process is slow, even for native speakers: reading and writing really are hard for everybody. If you have simple, modest objectives such as to have a simple conversation about family, work and home, that shouldn't be hard to do in a year. To read a newspaper will take longer, largely depending on how quickly you can build vocabulary. Learning new words is slow, and probably the limiting factor in learning, but it is something you can measure to assess your potential. If you use a flashcard app to learn, it will give you measures of progress which are useful. These apps are a bit optimistic - they don't rigourously test retention of words they have marked as 'learned' but you can calibrate them by giving yourself quizzes as a spot check. I would assess your progress after six months, once you have a stable learning method, to decide where you are going and how quickly you will get there.

Hi, I think classes are really the best way to start from. I am following some online courses. I think it is easy to get overwhelmed by study material. So it is important to focus on few references. But they only are in Pinyin, I also wanted to learn characters. So I find a good site to study characters: archchinese is my fav. Then I translated all my lessons in Hanzi. Believe me, I was impressed by people writing Hanzi, now I am able too. Chinese is difficoult, so the best you can do is to focus on basics. If you run too much, you will just waste your time. Stories will help to create a language: my reference is (example) https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/why-do-cats-always-want-to-eat-mice-intermediate I also love to study songs, you will find translations on lyricstranslate A good method I recently found to study, is to note down my questions. If the text says -- "The cinema will be open from 18 to 1am", then I write -- "What will be open?" so each time I make an effort to remember. Then, practice, of course. Ciao

I am a native Mandarin-speaker, I think the most important thing for beginners is to learn and spell 'pinyin' correctly. By the way, pinyin is Chinese Phonetic symbol.

Hi， im glad that you're willing to learn Mandarin，actually if you get the key to learn it， it's easy。 tips：1， learn pinyin first， pay more time on that， you'll gain more. 2，learn daily life topics after pinyin， learn useful things： words， phrases.. 3. listen more at first and say more. hope these can help you， any questions， you can ask me again.