When I started learning Mandarine, I got totally overwhelmed. Walked away with a massive headache and overload after every lesson. There's so many new things to learn that it's a huge wall to climb: Pinyin, Characters, Pronounciation, tones (what the #$% is that?), different sentence structure, same word being verb, noun, adverb etc etc. I needed smaller chunks of information, but more often, and lots of repetition. I have also always liked using a slew of different tools, that you can jump between. They stimulate the brain differently, uses different parts of the brain and can complement each other in the learning process - Tutor, 3 different study books, Chinesepod, Chinese Movies and Videos, Flashcards, Dictionaries and real live chinese friends. Of course this can become pretty expensive (it is).

Once you get over the introductory pain threshold, I like the "jump in the deep end "approach. I also felt I got several "ahaa" experiences at this stage, understanding things I had been tought months earlier, but then without a clue. When being at this stage, I felt most books, and classes are perceived as too slow or not enough challenging (The books typically have the same pace straight through the book, when they should instead start very slow and then half way through rapidly pick up speed. Once you get into the elementary stage, and are still enjoying the learning, I would really start challenging the student. Especially with themselves speaking the language (being in USA this has been a hard thing to achieve). While learning a language you go through many quick climbs and long plateaus, and the teaching should be adopted to that. I just picked up a book from the library called "Easy Chinese Readings in 500 Characters". This is a brilliant concept. You are totally on your own trying to read a text, but then you can flip a few pages over and get help with glossary and an english translation. I’ve learnt more in the 3 weeks I’ve had this book than in the past 3 months.