It involves 30 minute audio lessons using spaced repetition where you instinctively and intuitively build fluency over a restricted vocabulary.
It worked for me, but it's expensive, and requires patience, as it advances somewhat slowly.
I got Pimsleur for free through my public library. It's even available through various public library apps.
I’ve tried listening to some pimsleur tapes for Japanese and Chinese and it is hopeless even if you now a little bit already
Every day I would usually repeat the previous day's lesson, and do a new lesson.
For languages such as Japanese and Chinese, you'd probably need to repeat it more than that. It's recommended that you know about 80% of the answers before moving on to the next lesson.
That forced me to actually go learn Pinyin and learn about the j/q/x consonants. It took me about 2 months of obsessive practice to fix all the wrong pronunciations I taught myself from 1 month of Pimsleur.
I think for any non Western European language, it’s much better to learn the basics the old fashioned way, especially the writing system and all the phonetic aspects of the language that don’t exist in English.
To be honest it’s hard for me to understand the “Pinyin teaches you wrong pronunciation” line of thinking. It so commonly repeated by so many people that there must be something to it, but not for me.
I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough that people seem to understand well enough, but it's sometimes a bit awkward.
1) You don't see spaced repetition working until a few weeks in, once you're on a schedule.
2) You can't have gaps, so you can't just start in the middle.
3) If you know stuff, you need to keep with it until it gets into new stuff.
From there, it has to be done daily. If you miss 2-3 days, it's a chore to get back onto the schedule. I did it when I had a commute, so investing 30 minutes per day was easy. It added no time to my day, and by the end of 3 months, I knew /a lot/ of Chinese for not a lot of time invested. I was on-par with people who had roughly 2 years of college classes for speaking (but not reading or writing, which Pimsleur doesn't touch on). My accent was better too.
Once I finished, there was nowhere to go. Nothing else was nearly as efficient. I kind of plateaued. There are better tools now; this was many years ago.
I did the library/CDs route, so it was free.
I highly recommend the same path.
I haven't found anything good for writing Chinese. Does anyone have recommendations? Ideally, it'd leverage a pen tablet or iPad pencil or similar.
Also, check your local library. They may have access for you for free.