Taking a Language Seriously

I've been learning many languages and I've never taken them seriously enough to study them well. I figured if I was going to learn Mandarin I should stop wasting time and learn it while I'm still young enough to retain thing in my ever so spongy brain. What I've done is make flash cards with commonly used characters. I bring them to school and while pretending to listen to my French teacher I would take them out and practice writing Chinese by scribbling all over my agenda! It's good fun and I can write insults without anyone understanding. I've also been searching for e-books to aid in my learning of this language and I've found a few good ones and yes I have downloaded them because I'm poor and I can't afforded to buy them and I believe that one should not be restricted to learning something because of their wealth. The book I'm using was about 150mb and teaches you the 750 most commonly used words in 25 lessons. Before starting the lessons I highlighted the words on the list and found that I could already read 120 characters. This is a small amount but I'm happy that I even able to get over the 50 character mark. I'm sure that if I had studied harder when I was younger I would be able to read much more than that, possibly in the 500-600 range.

Anyone interested in learning spoken Chinese; this is one book that I've downloaded but I am not currently studying from it:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QI09125Z

The book I'm currently using is 150mb and is called "Rapid Literacy Chinese". Maybe I'll upload it one day... but it's a huge file compared to my slow upload rate!