I can't really answer your question, but I'm learning japanese. I'm a beginner in it, though. But it is a good startolt point:why do you want to learn chinese? Want is your goal and motivation? For starting I assume to watch some chinese movies and dramas with subs. Then start to learn some chinese character, want they mean and how to pronounce them. I'm sure you can find applications for mobile devices that teach there characters. And you should lógok for the chinese counsil where you live or if there is some kint of culture center of China. Oh, and you should search on Facebook, there are groups that want to learn chinese and they can give you some advice. I hope my comment was helpful :)

just like any other language -- words + grammar

Well,learn pin yin first,and then you can read some Chinese with pin yin,at last,try to write Chinese and talk with Chinese.I hope this way can be helpful to you.

I think you might be interested in what I wrote here: http://www.italki.com/discussion/86948 You need to decide what you mean when you say you want to "speak" Chinese. It could mean three things: 1) You want to be able to speak Chinese, but not read and write it. 2) You want to be able to speak, read and write Chinese, but you will be sticking to writing using your phone and your laptop. 3) You want to be able to handwrite Chinese characters. Chinese has a phonetic system called "Pinyin". It's a transcription of Chinese words using English letters. Chinese people NEVER communicate using Pinyin, but they do use Pinyin to type characters on a computer. For example, if I type "wan" using my Chinese character software, I can then select 玩, 碗, 晚 or 万 from a list of options. Because Chinese characters are so distinct, it's easy to recognise characters when you see them, but much harder to write them by hand. If you never need to handwrite Chinese however, you just need to know each character's Pinyin and to be able to recognise the characters when reading (and when you select the characters after typing the Pinyin). There are lots of characters I can't begin to visualise when I'm not looking at them, but I can recognise them instantly when I see them and I also know their Pinyin. Thus I have no problem reading and writing them as long as I don't have to write them by hand. Recently I've been going back through all the character I've learned so I can write them by hand and I've found that's much more time-consuming. It should be much easier if you only intend to write using technology. Even if you only intend to read characters, you should look up a list of the most common radicals (parts of a character) and memorise them. It's much easier to remember 想 as tree (木) plus eye (目) plus heart (心) than it is to memorise each stroke. Plus a lot of characters are the same as another character, but they have an extra radical on top or on the side.