Someone decided to start their lifelong journey of learning mandarin I believe it should start with the very basic basic Chinese. This is the basic phonetic language. I believe the best way how to learn Mandarin Chinese for the first master all 60 or so of voices. I suggest maybe spending a few weeks or even months to get all of this sound down pat as perfect as you, even before you start to learn how to say "hello" or anything else for that matter. It may be monotonous and boring at first, but you'll thank yourself later years to do so. I recommend getting a tape, or CD, or something from native speakers and listen to the voices in your sleep. I can not prove whether or not this is a contributing factor to the accurate pronunciation me, but it was something I did early on.
I personally have been lucky enough to have reached a very high level of Mandarin Chinese pronunciation. I believe this is partly due to the fact that I spend a lot of time polishing my pronunciation at an early stage. I can not emphasize this enough, because once you develop bad habits in pronunciation it is very difficult to get rid of, and that is not how you want to learn Chinese. I also would recommend not even think about learning how to read or write Chinese characters Chinese at this time. I think the best way how to learn Mandarin is to just focus on speaking and listening. Reading and writing can come later and is the most difficult aspect of this language. For the beginning you can only learn the language Romanized version known as "PinYin", which is a Chinese word meaning "Voice Spell / pronounce".
I personally have been lucky enough to have reached a very high level of Mandarin Chinese pronunciation. I believe this is partly due to the fact that I spend a lot of time polishing my pronunciation at an early stage. I can not emphasize this enough, because once you develop bad habits in pronunciation it is very difficult to get rid of, and that is not how you want to learn Chinese. I also would recommend not even think about learning how to read or write Chinese characters Chinese at this time. I think the best way how to learn Mandarin is to just focus on speaking and listening. Reading and writing can come later and is the most difficult aspect of this language. For the beginning you can only learn the language Romanized version known as "PinYin", which is a Chinese word meaning "Voice Spell / pronounce".