In my opinion, to master Chinese language, you'll need to put it loads of solid, hard effort. Abstract words that are of an advanced level are not graphically-explanatory anymore and memorisation by heart is the only alternative. And for writing, you just need to read as much as possible and practice it all the time, to be honest, even a native speaker like me forgets how to write certain words sometimes, I have to practise writing at least once per month to keep my mind sharp. For listening and speaking, interacting with a native speaker will be the best way learn, try more than one, it'll be the best of they have different accents. Hope this helps! Best of luck!

I used to exchange my mandarin for English with a native English speaker who lived and worked in my country. According to my observation, he became more fluent after 2 years of practice.

LOL about the sad/happy endings. Which ones are you watching? Maybe we can exchange good dramas. Have you heard of AJATT? I want to try doing that with my languages.

It's fun to do that with Portuguese/Spanish, but soon you realize they have a lot of false friends (words that sound the same but mean something completely different), haha.

Here's the long story:

Yes, I haven't started learning Chinese characters. I bought two books/CD sets at first, Colloquial Chinese by P.C. T'ung (this one does not contain a single Character at all, but it is great to learn how to speak and understand) and Teach Yourself Chinese, as well as Laoshu's FLR Method - Mandarin.

I buit a small vocabulary and phrases repertoire and started looking for Chinese/Taiwanese in my city using Weixin (WeChat) or abroad using QQ. Since I used to teach English on QQ to my coworkers in my company's Chinese branch (this was before I started learning Chinese), they were glad to help me out during my first weeks. 

Later on, I bought Assimil Chinese with ease because it contains a lot of dialogues, and even more recently I started using FluentU.com to see videos of situations that I might face in the future. I am able to type Chinese characters on my keyboard, although many times I type it right, I really don't know what I'm typing. This is possible because my Pinyin is really good and Sugou made a really good job creating their Chinese characters predictive software, haha.

I have not finished any of my books/cds. Whenever I get bored with one chapter or I can't make any progress in one book, I switch to another book and audio. I also watch a lot of Chinese movies, and Taiwanese soap operas. I wonder why do Chinese movies have sad endings, and Taiwanese soap operas have happy ones, lol.
 

Hi Allen, that's very helpful. I knew there was something like Yahoo questions and answers for kids the Japanese version but it's good to know Taiwan has one too.

Do you have something like discussion forums in Chinese? Anything related to language learning? I enjoy reading posts on language learning. I also like music, video games, different cultures, etc.