Can't make this shit up...

I found this app was really helpful getting started https://www.superchinese.com/ It breaks things up into short lessons, and it has voice recognition so you can practice speaking and see whether you're pronouncing things correctly. After you get comfortable listening and reciting the phrases a bit, I also recommend watching youtube channels like Lazy Chinese. They break things up by comprehension level, so you can start with beginner, and work your way up. Eventually, it really helps to practice with a native speaker. If you have any classes offered in town or know anybody who speaks Mandarin that'd be willing to help you practice, that's ultimately how you get to the point where you can really talk to people. My advice is not to worry about writing characters to start, and don't worry too much about tones. They are important, but people will understand you from context most of the time if you get some wrong. It's also easier to learn tones in the context of a sentence. I still have trouble with tones if I just pronounce an individual word, but when I speak a sentence, I've learned to recognize the cadence, so I get them right most of the time now.

I am in no way an AI fan. For example the environmental inpact could be as big as planes or cars. Sure, using planes is nice and convenient, but is this worth destroying our planet? Sinilarly, the disruption and undercutting of human creative work. But I have seen it myself, you can feed these things some Windows software and a device for a bit of testing, and it spits out the reverse engineered device protocol, and a prototype Python 'driver'.

But then there's no "free PR" about how their agents are super powerful unsupervised hacking machines.