wanna learn to speak chinese?

Here's how I did it. For the first five years or so I said "Ni hao" to everybody that I saw who looked Asian. Sometimes they would say "Ni hao" back and sometimes they would say "Konichiwa" or "Anyohasayo" and sometimes they would say "huh?" Whatever. Anyway after that I moved to Taiwan and discovered that "Ni hao" was actually not nearly enough vocabulary to get by on. Still if someone asked I would say "Sure I speak Chinese everyday..." Having come to the late realization that "Ni hao" was actually a pretty small vocabulary I made an attempt to expand upon the range of common phrases and expresions at my disposal. It wasn't long before I was saying "xie xie" and "jie guo" all over the place. Fortified by my success at this I decided to go at vocabulary study full on and started making lists of things that I might want to say and translated those lists into pinyin when I got a chance. This was about three years ago. I put vocabulary and sentence lists up all over my house and reviewed them whenever I had the time. I think this list is up to around 3 thousand words, phrases and sentences. I try to focus on the stuff that I will actually use. This means that I am getting fairly good at talking about grammar and engaging in light chit chat with excitable young women. If someone asked me for the wrench we used last week to fix the timing mechanism on the automatic bean sorter however I think I would be stumped as would most of the other contributors to this forum I suspect. If you are looking for a way to become reasonably fluent in day to day life I would say review the heck out of the common vocab and patterns and then try to use that stuff as much as possible. Ask someone to correct your grammar and pronunciation. Continue with this approach only with more and more advanced material for the rest of your life and if you are lucky you might scratch the surface. P.S. PinYin is a godsend. The secrets to language learning are in context listening practice, vocabulary study and attempts at communication regarding things that are actually of some interest and use to you.