These study logs seem pretty fun and a good way to track progress. I will detail my learning progress, my goals, my challenges, and anything else that may come up 
I have been wanting to travel to China for basically my whole life; I always wanted to take the plunge and start learning Mandarin, but I never found the motivation and time to do so. I had actually been pretty deep in my Spanish studies the past few years, and that has been going really well! I live in an area with a lot of Spanish speakers and basically no Mandarin speakers, so the resources available for me to learn Spanish are just much, much higher. My Spanish is actually at a pretty good place right now, and I would still be studying it further if I didn’t just get completely addicted to learning Chinese.
Around late May, I saw a Facebook post from a girl from China offering Mandarin tutoring lessons, and I thought, what better time to start learning than now! I sent her a message and set up weekly lessons starting in mid-June. At this point, I have absolutely zero experience with Chinese and Mandarin. I knew some concepts; I knew it was a tonal language and vaguely knew what that meant, and I also knew this was going to be a completely different learning experience compared to Spanish. I decided to dive into some self-study, having absolutely no idea where to start, overwhelmed by the concepts of tones, characters, pronunciations. Spanish was easy because I was already starting with a basis of some knowledge of the language, knowing some words, and being around the language a lot; it was easy to dive into some comprehensible input with Spanish and immerse myself in the language. Chinese, on the other hand, is going to take some extra hand-holding.
I started where I had read was the best place to start, which is with pinyin and pronunciation. For about a week, a couple of hours a day, I would go through a pinyin chart and practice saying each sound and each tone (this would end up paying off greatly for my pronunciation!), getting better at reading pinyin and making all the sounds! After this week, I thought it was probably a good time as ever to start diving into learning actual sentences, vocab, characters, basically the entire language lol.
It was around this time, at the beginning of June, that I discovered HanziHero, which has completely changed how I study vocab! I had known that I should be looking into spaced repetition, and that, despite flashcards not being useful for my Spanish learning, it would probably be required for Chinese. I messed around with Anki for a little bit, but HanziHero is just too convenient, not to mention the premade mnemonics for everything! It has quickly become my favorite part of my Chinese studying! In terms of all the resources used at this time, it’s mostly been Du Chinese, Little Fox, HanziHero, and my weekly textbook and tutor study.
We’re at about 3 months since I started learning Chinese, starting from complete zero. I just finished my HSK1 textbook last week and will be starting HSK2 very soon. In HanziHero, I am already nearly done with all of the characters from HSK2 and don’t plan on slowing down! My reading skills and character recognition are improving very steadily; basically, I can recognize all of the HSK1 characters without having to use the mnemonic at all. In terms of my plans moving forward, I will continue to use all the same resources I do now, but now that I feel I have a really good framework of vocabulary under my belt, I am going to be increasing the comprehensible input I consume by a lot. I will be filling my day with as much passive and active listening as I can, really internalizing the sound and flow of Mandarin.
My current goal is to be at HSK 4 level by next summer when I plan to travel to China! My main focus in Chinese is on reading and conversational skills (not writing yet, though maybe eventually if I want to actually get HSK certified!). It is my goal that I can handle myself while I’m in China and be able to converse with people without the use of a translator app at all. It feels a bit ambitious, but I also certainly feel it’s doable and feel that my pace is good! Language learning is, of course, not one linear path, with lots of ups and downs, good days and bad days, but considering where I was just a few months ago to now, I have high belief in myself!
the main thing lacking is access to the audio, right? Though when it comes to practicing like you had in mind, perhaps the audio would be lacking in nuance since they’re generated
It makes me wonder whether we should instead cut the day at exactly 12am, rather than the current 4am