I'm sorry to have missed this question since I taught English in China from September '88 to June '89 and studied Chinese extensively before, during and after. But David gave an outstanding reply, so kudos to him. I hope that you are doing well in China. Best wishes!

The book Chinese for Dummies.

Good luck - you should have achieved a lot by the end of the year, but you'll enjoy it more if you make a rapid start, so there's no time to waste.

Don't put any great effort into trying to read Chinese - lots of Chinese teachers and language courses put too much emphasis on learning characters and turn it all into a terrible slog that will simply wear you down, and you still won't be able to read it usefully a year from now, so it's a pointless torture that should be put off until a later visit. You can still take an interest in Chinese characters and learn the important ones that appear on signs, but it's a lot easier to learn the spoken language first before you try to learn to read it, and you'll gain a higher capability with it if you just focus on conversation and understanding, initially working a lot by reading things written in pinyin.

I can't recommend any specific language courses as all the ones that I have have been replaced since by new ones - publishers keep changing them for no good reason, but most of them have good points and bad points which means you would do well to buy more than one anyway. It's good to work through three or four of them as that gives you lots of revision as you go along without having to read the same book repeatedly. If one course gets too tough, you can simply switch to another, and if that gets too tough, switch again, and then when you go back to the one(s) where you got stuck before, you'll usually find that you then make further progress with ease.

It's worth getting at least one language course with a CD (preferably one that's designed for learning without needing to follow the action in a book all the time), but it's more efficient to work from books, and a lot less expensive. If you're making notes as you go along, write them directly into the books. Fold the corners of pages over to mark important parts that you may want to look up repeatedly. Write your own contents list inside the front cover. Normally, these aren't things you want to do to books, but with language courses it enhances them.

Don't grind yourself into the dust. Work for short stretches of time as often as you feel like it rather than trying to put in blocks of hard work lasting many hours - if it ceases to be interesting and fun, you're trying to do too much and you'll risk burning out. I do most of my language learning while watching TV - many programmes with some worthwhile content have lots of dull parts too (and adverts) which can be filled in by reading a page or two of a language course, and repeatedly switching between the two things helps to keep the work interesting. It's almost as if you learn a language for free, hardly seeming to put in any effort at all.

When you start learning a language, don't blindly do everything the language course tells you to. If it asks you to answer in Chinese or translate into Chinese, don't bother - you can save that up for the second read through the course when you'll be better placed to attempt the task. On the first read through the course, just focus on translating from Chinese to English - it is much easier to start trying to produce Chinese sentences of your own after you have already learned to understand Chinese extensively. Understanding Chinese is more important than speaking it - you can usually make yourself understood with a few words, but you'll have a much easier time if you maximise your ability to understand what's being said to you rather than focusing too soon on trying to speak well.

When selecting language courses, look for the ones which give a comprehensive run through the grammar. (You don't need to memorise the rules, but you do want to be introduced to them). Any book that has long chapters about food will be a terrible bore to read, so avoid it. Any book that spends more than one chapter making you practice saying "hello", "how are you", "goodbye" is probably going to be too shallow - such courses typically have no ambition to teach you the language, but will merely give you the ability to sound as if you might be able to speak it when you start a conversation before leaving you completely stuck and looking like an idiot - all they do is teach you how to decorate a cake rather than how to make one. Look for courses with interesting texts, and make sure translations of all of them are provided so that you don't have to spend most of your time looking up vocabulary lists or dictionaries instead of being allowed to get on with learning the actual language. Avoid language courses that are full of pictures - you don't want to pay for a hundred grams of bad art instead of getting lots of exposure to the language.

(One of the Chinese courses that I have does attempt to teach characters, but it doesn't force you to learn them, so you can save that up for later. When you are ready for it though, it's a good idea to use reading glasses even if you don't normally need them - too much time spent with your eyes at close focus, straining to make out subtle little differences between characters, can affect your ability to focus to infinity, but you can take all that strain off the focusing muscles by wearing reading glasses - the idea is that you want to read with your eyes focused to infinity (where the muscles are totally relaxed). A lot of Chinese people become short-sighted, and it's a fair bet that the strain of reading Chinese text has a role in that, making the eyeball grow bigger. As soon as you find difficulty focusing to infinity, that's when you need to start using reading glasses, even if you have no trouble focusing close - if you don't take action at that point, you may never recover the ability to focus to distance and will have to wear glasses for things like driving.)

Ahhh check your room for cameras?