I’m trying to learn to speak Chinese and not read it yet. The issue is most of the language learning apps have a focus on characters. I feel like I just want to see the pinyin. Maybe I don’t know what I need, but I haven’t found the right tool.
You listen to audio you don't understand yet, and over time your brain begins to pick up the patterns. It takes a lot of time but you can do it in the background, because that processing happens subconsciously. So you can get that time "for free".
I learned it from this guy https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.html
But he got it from linguist Stephen Krashen and his Input Hypothesis of language acquisition. (i.e. that the way babies and kids learn languages, thru osmosis, works for adults too.)
I think the ideal solution is somewhere in the middle, starting with something like Pimsleur which is the same idea (audio and repetition) but more structured and focused, to give you that "seed" of vocabulary and grammar, before you flesh it out with the "long tail" of the language.
For adults learning a language, I think you need 3 things to be most efficient. You need to learn the grammar rules/structure, you need vocabulary, and you need lots and lots of content. The specificity of Pimsleur I think is a major blocker. It lacks both vocabulary and content, and there is often a better resource for explaining grammar. I guess maybe the first unit of each Pimsleur course is pretty ok for getting used to the mouthfeel of a language, though.
For Spanish, I got far more out of languagetransfer.org, which helped me understand the concepts of the language much more, and dreaming.com, which gave me lots of content. For Chinese, I haven't found a course I like, but I still think I got more from drilling characters (I made my own app, but something like hanzihero or just an HSK/TOCFL Anki deck is probably good) and using graded readers. I think spoken-first in Chinese is a little bit of a trap, because it's easier to remember things with the written characters, when the relationships between words is a bit more clear.
edit: oh also sidenote, it's been a long time since I used it, but iirc, the Mandarin one is particularly outdated (eg talks about using a phone book) and uses a Beijing dialect, so everyone in Taipei made fun of me the first time I went there.
The gist of those methods is mass input + create SRS cards for sentences where only one word or grammar pattern is unfamiliar to you.
A similar but more relaxed approach is ALG (automatic language growth), where you start from very basic input with lots of visual aids and let the language “wash over you”: no taking notes, no creating flashcards, no dictionary lookups. Sounds crazy, but it works for a lot of people. It’s the method behind Dreaming Spanish, which was inspired by the teaching method at the AUA language school in Bangkok, where Dr. J Marvin Brown used Stephen Krashen’s ideas to create a Natural Approach course to teach foreigners Thai from zero to fluency.