NewCultivator To prevent you from making a big mistake. Chinese is a TONAL language.
It is a spoken language. Once you learn a wrong tone, you speak a VERY DIFFERENT Thing. Similar to Spanish papa (potato) and papa (father).
Get a proper native to correct you. This is one of the language that you can't learn without a TEACHER for speaking. Use NATIVE Chinese people (Beijing to prevent you get dialect). (for writing don't use Taiwan's traditional style, mainland people (where the big market in the future is) write in simplified.)
For the words, this Rabbink used "repetition until stick" method. Remembering the Hanzi (writing style) is the easier part of the language. Tone is the hard part.