Sorry that my English is not good. But last month I wrote an note: For the beginners who wants to learn Chinese Mandarin Chinese is not too hard for every foreigner. For the beginners, first you need to learn Chinese Pinyin. It’s made up of initials and finals. Then you will learn the basic four tones and the some tones Sandhi (some tones will change). There are four basic tones in standard Chinese. If the tones are different, the meanings of the same syllable will be different.This part is very boring, but after that, when you see pinyin you can read every Chinese sentence.http://www.italki.com/entry/330328

Your first step should be to study pinyin. Though Chinese is not written using pinyin, and you will need to learn to read hanzi, pinyin will help you learn how to pronounce the sounds of Mandarin and help you look up hanzi in a dictionary. You will also need to learn about the 4 tones used in Mandarin. They are very important.

To get started it is best to have formal class lessons. You can try also Chinesepod.com, they are prtty good, experiment there and look around for a week, then you need to pay, but not much

maybe u can get start by identifying chinese characters(as far as i'm concerned,just recommend ),like learning English words,grasping the four tones of character should be fundamental and important as well,and then what u need to do is just combining different characters together(the same with English phrases and sentences) ,read them out loud and try to practice as often as possible,great progress will be made without any doubt,but there's one thing that should be kept in mind namely success never comes easy.anyway,i hope and believe every single one of u can be capable of speaking chinese well as long as u study hard and trust yourself :) by the way,i'm a English learner,hope all of us can make progress together and become good friends.

start with some daily-used expressions( such as greetings, expressing thanks, making an introducation) as long as the pinyin stuff which shows you how to read the chinese characters.