Learning radicals is highly advisable. It may seem silly to learn meanings of things which are not words, but it helps you build associations, mnemonics, and stories to remember the characters (without having to pay for an app to do it for you).
Although I don’t follow its advice to the letter, my favourite motivational language learning blog is AJATT which recommends an immersion-based language learning methodology.
A key that I think a lot of beginners aren’t taught is that it’s nigh on pointless to try and identify the tone of a single syllable. Instead, learn about tone pairs. I haven’t actively studied that but came to the same conclusion while learning.
My resources have a bias towards Taiwanese Mandarin.
Studying
A general note - for any CN learning app, even if it seems to be for Simplified, take a look for an option to change the display to Traditional!
“A Course in Contemporary Chinese” textbooks - a bit slow, but provided some structure to my learning. (I don’t recommend the anki decks you can find online for these books, they have a few mistakes).
I read some of the Ninchanese Chinese Grammar app, and liked it, but it’s in Simplified. The Tae Kim of Chinese.
Anki - I had a personal deck to record words that I saw/looked up when I was out and about. I also had a deck of 6000 most common characters but used it less often. I already knew radicals from Japanese, and didn’t bother learning Chinese meanings (although I think my impression of their meanings is slowly changing to the Chinese ones now).
Currently I don’t use Anki because I don’t want to learn each word so perfectly anymore. I just write lists of words in a notebook to test myself.
DuShu - A marvelous app for practicing reading, specifically its “read from clipboard” option. It generates a nicely laid out pronunciation guide and dictionary for the text with options to hide and reveal definitions/pronunciations so you can practice recall.
Hanping Lite dictionary - it was just the first one I installed. The handwriting option is very good at understanding you even if you don’t know the stroke order - much better than Pleco.
Pleco - I use it to see example sentences.
MDBG - most convenient web dictionary.
Yellowbridge - I like that it shows the stroke order and words sharing the same characters
https://youglish.com/chinese - Haven’t used. Look up a word and it finds you a moment in a youtube with someone saying it. Should be helpful to find youtube on a certain topic as well.
Practice
Yotsuba&! aka 四葉妹妹 - Very cute and peaceful manga about a quirky kid learning about the world. The first one I’ve found which has a low enough language level that I can comfortably read most of it. I.e. suitable for beginner-intermediate.
Mandarin Companion graded readers - well written adaptations of classics, that make you want to keep reading despite the tiny vocabulary. It’s exciting to be able to read a real story and my vocabulary goes up without much effort.
https://lear-taiwanese-mandarin.webnode.tw/ Lovely podcast, all in Chinese, talking about interesting topics and aiming to be comprehensible for intermediate learners.
https://teatimechinese.com/ Same concept, mainland Chinese, slightly less engaging for some reason.
https://www.youtube.com/@ComprehensibleChinese - The best Chinese learning Youtube channel ever! No english, no subtitles, she tells interesting stories that even a beginner can understand and learn new vocabulary from, and I mean you’ll really learn it, not enter it into your Anki deck.
https://www.youtube.com/@DANLIAOFreeToLearnChinese Haven’t watched much but seems to also focus on comprehensible input so you can listen without subs
https://www.youtube.com/@MandarinWithMissLin https://www.youtube.com/@GraceMandarinChinese https://www.youtube.com/@ShuoshuoChinese Chinese lessons videos. I haven’t watched a lot of these but they seem good for learning some linguistics, grammar, or useful words.
https://rongzhi.tumblr.com/ - Subbed douyins. Subs mean no learning, the only thing I have learned from these are Chinese meme culture, swearwords and details of how young people talk, but they are fun. You can also see some Chinese traditional culture. My favourite are the sketch comedy accounts, Wang Qiye and Soy Sauce White Rice
Immersion
People talk as if immersion is a magic ritual which makes you learn a language. In my experience, the benefit of immersion is this: when you first start with a language, speech goes by too fast, and text looks like a block of gibberish. Immersion acclimatises you, so that speech seems to be slower, you can identify the parts of speech, and words on the page are easier to parse. It’s not going to improve your vocabulary or anything.
Another advantage is that you will hear the vocabulary and grammar that you’ve learned recently (Like if you could put Anki on in the background rather than sitting down and drilling it). In general, immersion forces you to think about your target language in some small way and that counts for a lot.
Music! I got into mandopop via Jay Chou and he has the advantage that many of his songs have an english translation for you to study from. Now I find stuff via youtube autoplay. Although chinese singing doesn’t include tones, again, it gets you thinking about the language and encourage you to learn vocab to understand the lyrics or sing along. KTV is essential Asian culture after all.
https://shrs.shu.edu.tw/ - Popular student radio. Often there is cpop, also plays some kpop and jpop, maybe even hokkien (depends on the radio show/time of day - if you hear two japanese songs in a row come back in an hour). I think the variety is great. Sometimes there are 1-3 people talking, sometimes as an interview and other times podcast-style. Sometimes there is music, sometimes there is a crosstalk recording.
https://www.youtube.com/@FroggyChiu Uncle who talks a lot and clearly. I like his food series.
https://www.youtube.com/@MandarinCorner2 - Street interviews, walking tours etc. More intermediate-advanced but with english subs if you just want entertainment.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NNHcgyx2Cdw&list=PLK-ys7c4EcnrR4UiA9n1hRox8b0EJ88gx&index=2&ab_channel=JuneJacobs Legend of luoxiahei - it’s just cute, there is not that much talking but it’s at a low level if you want to pause and understand it.