The New Practical Chinese Reader series of textbooks is very good. There are six textbooks in total (I'm on the fourth one), and they each have accompanying workbooks. Each lesson contains a LARGE list of vocab, extremely detailed grammar explanations, one conversation transcript (you can find all the conversation recordings on Youtube if you want to have a look), one block of text in Chinese (usually on a cultural subject) and several pages worth of examples and exercises. The workbooks have many more excercises in them. These textbooks are very standard, so they shouldn't be too hard to find. The books are often used by universities to teach Chinese, so you could have a look at what books nearby unis are proscribing for their Chinese courses.

The FSI Chinese course is amazing at teaching speaking. Nothing compares to speaking with a native speaker, but the FSI course will give you a very strong foundation in listening from scratch. The FSI courses are all a series of tapes, which may or may not have accompanying textbooks. They were developed by the US government for ambassadors or politicians who needed to quickly teach themself a new language. They're all in the public domain and you can find them completely legally for free on several websites.

http://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/chinese.html

The Chinese FSI course gives you some vocab, explains some sentence structures, then gives you LOTS of listening exercises (mostly listening to different conversations) at full speed. You will generally hear each recording twice normally, and then a third time where the English translation is given after every sentence. Each unit is about 1.5-2 hours and is split accross 4-5 tapes.

The FSI courses have been criticised as being extremely boring. I tried a few of the other FSI courses and found that the Chinese FSI course is actually pretty good, although I think the Introduction sentence drags on a bit. You can just do the "Pronunciation and Romanisation" section of the introduction and skip straight to Module 1 if you want. If nothing else, I strongly recommend you do the six "Pronunciation and Romanisation" tapes. I have never come across a better explanation of Chinese pronunciation.

If you're planning on learning to read and write, start of by memorising the radicals. Radicals are the parts that make up a character. For example, 想 is made up of three radicals: 木, 目 and 心. It's <em>much</em> easier to remember that "想" is made up of radicals meaning "tree", "eye" and "heart" than it is to memorise each stroke individually. 

I think you should start with Chinese “拼音”- phonetic transcription. It just like 50 Japanese phonetic and English phonetic symbol~ hope this help

Movies with subtitles and music + speaking to native speakers))) I am a begginer in Mandarin, but I learned English this way, so I am going to do the same with Mandarin.

If you believe strong foundations will take your potential development further, then proper tones and proper pinyin practice will take up a large proportion of the time in the initial stages. Follow something like NCPR, or whatever your preference, for some structured syllabus to your learning (gives an idea of progress). And then intersperse it with learning around subjects you have a personal interest in. Of course, knowing some cantonese will help but I find it helps more with sentence construction rather than pronunciation. 

I found z-, zh-, c- very difficult to pronunce consistently. It was partly because my ear was not used to hearing the differences. Eventually got fed up and spent something like three lessons on these areas training my ear and my mouth muscles to get it right. You have to explain this objective very clearly to the teacher. I found not all teachers can teach in this way. Perhaps they are worried the boredom would drive away the student. In this way, iTalki is a good because you can go to different teachers who have different strengthsbin particular areas.