I've just finished level 2 of my Mandarin Chinese evening class, so wanted to write up a few more notes on my progress.
My study techniques since my first post have been a 2 hour class once a week (with just 5 other people, so the teaching is very intimate), plus a pretty small amount of personal study every day. This is mostly working through an Anki deck which I created and keep updated with all of the new vocab I come across, as well as occasionally reading articles/stories on Du Chinese.
Even this pretty minimal amount of extra study really keeps me ahead of the curve, and I go into each new class feeling like I've really solidified the previous week's content and ready to take on whatever comes next.
I'm also seeing a huge benefit from a decision I made early on to only have Chinese characters on the front of my Anki cards, no pinyin. This means I'm forced to recognise and memorise the characters themselves, not just the anglicised pronunciation. The latter would be fine if your only goal is to speak the language, but reading it is quite important to me as well. I'm probably up to around 200 characters confidently learned at this point, and far more words than that since "words" are just combinations of multiple characters. e.g. 好 = "good", 吃 = "eat", 好吃 = "delicious".
Words is one thing, but full sentences is quite another. Again I've made huge strides here, but one of the things I'm finding trickiest about Chinese is the sentence structure. Chinese seems to have far less grammar than English (there are no verb conjugations or tenses for example) so word order does a lot more of the heavy lifting. There's really no room to think in English and translate that thought to Chinese - you just need to know the Chinese way of saying it. e.g. I want to go to a cafe with you today = 我今天想和你去咖啡馆 (literal translation "I today want and you go cafe").
One thing that's less important to me, and I've actually completely dropped from my study at least for the time being, is writing characters by hand. I do believe this would be an effective way of memorising characters, but the time investment right now is just too much for too little pay off compared to the other studying I'm doing. I do still spend a lot of time "writing" in Chinese, but this is done digitally, typing in pinyin and selecting your intended characters. This felt clumsy to begin with, but actually is a very fluid and easy way to write and has been an incredibly satisfying skill to pick up.
On the speaking side of things something I struggled with initially was tones. This is still tricky, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, but it's amazing just how much more natural this is becoming already. I can already read and speak far more fluidly than I could in level 1, and tones/pinyin pronunciation of individual words comes very naturally at this point. It's fascinating how a language feature like this which feels so alien to begin with, just by perservering with it can begin to feel so natural, and then you really can't imagine it any other way. Finding out that mā, má, mǎ and mà are all completely different words was so interesting and amusing a few months ago, but now it just makes sense!
Sadly I now have a 6 week break from classes before level 3 starts up, but I'm planning to use that time productively. I'll be continuing with my Anki deck and Du Chinese every day, and I've also downloaded a couple of more fully-featured Anki decks which I found online. These contain sentences and sound snippets for each card which are fantastic for context, and will also allow me to gradually work back through a lot of the vocab and concepts I've already encountered in class to really shore up my knowledge.
As you can no doubt tell, I'm having a blast learning this fascinating and beautiful language, and I can't wait to continue on. I'll update again after level 3!