Roadtest

With a bit of time I have left, I've been perusing some discussions relating to living in China and learning mandarin forums. Quite a good forum is Chinese-forums. There's plenty of information there and people can ask questions and get lots of tips on a variety of topics. eg. people's experiences at various language schools, how to find accommodation, discussion on the actual mandarin language itself, etc.

It is on this forum that I found links to various online Chinese Study Tools, which I find very useful. In particular I have roadtested a couple of very cool Chinese-English dictionaries where you can also hear how the word should be pronounced, as well as how to write words. With this there is also a function to translate English names to Chinese names, and even put the names on a chinese painting and print it out - a lot of fun!

There is also a Pinyin Practice site which is very useful for beginners.

Definitely check out the above sites if you are interested in learning mandarin.