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Search online to try and find sites that provide language exchange. These are a good opportunity to have regular lessons and give at the same time as receiving. Try and find or organise meet-ups in your area. I know a friend who is learning at the moment and he catches up every Saturday morning with about 3 or 4 others. This was organised by putting up a ...

There are books specifically designed for learners, such as the Chinese Breeze Graded Readers. These books are small, have constrained vocabulary, and relatively simple stories, but not so basic that you don't feel some sense of accomplishment after reading one. I read the book 错，错，错！ which features police officers investigating a suspicious suicide. The ...

My personal preference is children's books and television. If you have a China town section of your local city you should be able to find a book store with children's books in them. You usually won't find these books in a regular foreign langauges store or even large chain book stores. The alternative is to go to the children's second language section of a ...

I built some tools to help me with reading practice. I sieved through Chinese text looking for sentences that use only the characters I know. My first attempt was with Twitter updates, but it was kind of a slow process to find and translate them. More recently, I found a huge collection of translated sentences on Tatoeba. I've collected all the sentences ...

Global Voices is a social site for hosting translations of articles in other languages. Popup Chinese has a tool to help you translate Chinese articles, but they don't have full translations of the articles. I haven't used either of these sites, I've just seen them mentioned elsewhere.

To memorize characters and pronunciation you can use Memrise, which will help you to learn by repeating words you've missed during the previous learning session. However, you won't learn any grammar or usage, just words. So it is not a complete solution, but a good help to expand your vocabulary. It is not as feature complete as Codeacademy but I don't ...

One strategy I use is shopping whenever I can at shops with Chinese speaking proprietors (Fast-food, groceries, restaurants, anything). I use a bit of Chinese, this generally interests them, and you will find that you have a small conversation with this person every time you go there. (Incidentally this is also a great way to get discounts :)

The only place that comes to my mind is looking for an international penpal, getting to know each other and using a chatting service that allows you two to call using a webcam. That way you can also "choose" a Cantonese speaker, and considering those sites, also with similar interests that you have.