Originally published: August 22, 2007 at 5:15 p.m.
Updated: June 25th, 2008 at 6:15 p.m.

I’ve taken an interest in learning Mandarin and am slowly but surely working on the long process of picking up enough to be conversational.  I’ve had people say they were interested in this and would like to know what resources I have / where I got started.  Who knows, maybe this will be useful to someone else.  If you’ve got additions to suggest I’d be glad to hear them.

Links are divided into two categories, Random and Lessons.  Obviously I haven’t read/listened to and understood everything linked to from here yet.
Random

MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary – Without a doubt the best dictionary I’ve found, you can hear pronunciations and look up the proper stroke order for writing out characters.

LiveMocha – A community of people wanting to learn languages, has courses, flash cards, messaging of other members, written and spoken passages and many other features.  At the time of writing this site is in Beta with everything they’ve got being offered for free, but, apparently at some point in the future that might change.  The site itself isn’t 100% (some things are a bit buggy); but, it’s still quite useful.

Chinese Internet Radio and Online News Radio – I’m not at the point of being able to keep up with the pace of what people say here; but, I think that’s as good a goal as any for where I’d like to be eventually in my comprehension.
Baidu – well known Chinese search engine

Sinosplice – has lots of random cultural insights/stories.
BBC Languages – Learn Chinese – haven’t spent much time with this one but it looks kind of neat

Chinese Characters @ About.com -  kind of cool.
Learn Chinese Techniques – A possible method to the madness.

Lessons

Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection -  I found a lot of the podcasts listed here elsewhere first; but, haven’t found as complete a list anywhere else.  I use a combination of them; I find hearing/learning from any one particular podcast doesn’t quite get me as far as hearing the same words pronounced by several different speakers on different podcasts.  This site has some more.
Free Chinese Writing Lessons – the writing bit isn’t my area of focus at this point.
Chinese (Mandarin) @ Wikibooks – This is neat; it has the most clear guide to rules for writing in Chinese that I’ve found so far (including animations of stroke order).
Chinese Phrasebook @ Wikitravel – Handy reference for looking up things that tend to slip my mind; I don’t find it so great unless I’ve already heard the thing I’m looking for pronounced elsewhere several times.  Chinese 101 is similar in purpose.
Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese lessons – (they’re expensive to buy; but, sometimes you can find them on various Torrent sites and such).

Books

Practical Audio-Visual Chinese – my house mate Joseph owns this book; I’ve borrowed it and read part of it.  The book seems to teach people to be excessively polite which is a bit funny; but, it’s cool and a fun challenge to be able to read paragraphs of pinyin from further on (beyond my current level) and be able to understand bits of what’s happening.

Chinese in Plain English – not very good for getting the tones right.  I got this before I really understood the methodology behind Pinyin (which they don’t use) and I wish it used Pinyin with proper tone marks instead of it’s own less standard system.