A good friend of mine has put together a site and it has had a load of new stuff put on recently to help those novices learning Mandarin. http://www.fozza.com/learn/ There are some really good tools worth looking at: http://www.fozza.com/tools/ one of my favorites is the Hanzimatic http://www.fozza.com/tools/hanzimatic/ you put chinese text in and it will give you the pinyin and English translation. Parts are still being updated, but it's great stuff, can't recommend it anymore
interesting things on the site thanks for the link, I hope that it gets developed and extended with lot more useful things on it. I find this bbc site very useful and easy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/
