I'll tell you the things I did first. 1. I spent the first three months watching Taiwan TV shows and Kung Fu movies from the 1960's and 1970's. The 3 best Taiwan TV shows that I found were: The Devil Beside You (惡魔在身邊) Office Girl (小資女孩向前衝) It Started with a Kiss (惡作劇之吻) 2. After the three month period, I learned Pin yin which took about two weeks. 3. I found a list of the most frequently used Chinese characters and tested how many characters could I learn in a day. It took me just 20 minutes to learn the first 25 characters from the list. The next day I tested myself on how many of the 25 I could still remember, and I got 90% correct. For the record, I once memorized 85 in a day using this method. 4. I registered at this extremely cool and totally free website, http://abcsofchinese.com. This website has lessons on learning Chinese radicals (部首), the individual components that make up a Chinese character. I couldn't believe the site was free. A lot of time and money was put into that website. I assumed some wealthy guy who wanted people to learn Chinese must have bankrolled that website. After I learned about 175 Chinese radicals, there are 187 in simplified and 217 in traditional ... then I started putting more effort into learning 4. Words ... knowing the radicals made learning characters and words more easy ... because I knew what the individuals parts meant ... Funny story, I was talking to a woman from China and I said, sometimes, the simplified characters make more sense than the traditional ones. For instance, the character 还, the definition which means can be easily remembered because 辶 means walk ... but 不 means no, so together they mean no walk or still. After I said this, the woman said, I never noticed that before. This was one of the benefits of using the website www.abcofchinese.com

The first step is to feel motivated enough. If you don't feel that energetic about learning mandarin, you'll probably give up after a month-long try. Then if you want to teach yourself mandarin, chances are that you won't be able to go very far, so enroll yourself in a mandarin school! :p

I'd suggest you to go to a mandarin school. Because you don't know yourself how to learn, from where to start, do you pronounce correctly or not, is your grammar correct etc. You need someone to lead you. And I think it's better for beginners to study in group in a classroom, not online. Although I am personally a strong introvert, I have to say this. Please consider carefully your decision, then find a good school, where they not pay back for missed lessons and pay in advance for a half year or more. And never miss your lessons even if it-is-so-cold-today-and-I-feel-not-good-and-other-shit. After a year or more you will have an idea how you should continue, and you may start taking online lessons and also practise some self-tutoring, using all these computer programms, movies etc. It's much more comfortable and relaxing. It may be so relaxing, that you may start cutting power and study less and less and less. It may turn to some slow-moving process, 原地踏步. I believe, many people stat studying language with this easy way, like self planned lessons at home, and for most of them it turns to slow-moving process and they would never start speaking the language. So I wish you never原地踏步.

I agree with Dawei's suggestions. I might add that hulu.com, youtube.com, tudou.com, NTDTV.com, and youku.com are all good places to get more modern Chinese TV shows. Aside from that, finding good resources is also important. I usually use the Pleco phone app and mdbg.net as dictionaries. Between the two of those you should be able to find any word you don't recognize. Google translate is good for turning long sentences into pinyin if you're trying to learn new texts. This can be pretty convenient if you're not sure of the pronunciation of a word or what the long/short form is, but don't want to look at the English. Then you just set it to translate Simplified to Traditional, or vice versa. The actual translation feature is pretty worthless though. dict.baidu.com is also a pretty good C-E dictionary, though that's short form since it's a Mainland website. I will say it's much easier to pick one character system and stick with that. Learning both long and short form will slow you down a bit. How you decide which to choose will probably depend on what you want to do with your Chinese. If you're learning it for recreation then long form characters may be easier on you. Long form is currently more prevalent outside of China, both in terms of culture (most American "China Towns" are populated by Cantonese or Mandarin speakers that use long form) and in terms of media export. If you plan to do business in the Mainland, obviously you'll want to learn short form. Also, the northern and southern accents are pretty different, so learning long form will affect your accent. Anything from NTDTV is going to be long form because that's Taiwanese. In my experience Youtube leans slightly towards long form, but not exclusively by any means. Youku and Tudou are both Mainland sites and so they use exclusively short form. I'm pretty sure Microsoft's default character set is simplified, so it takes an extra step to set it to long form if you're typing in pinyin.

1) learn pinyin 2) memorize HSK word-lists