Without a teacher there is no direction…
When I went to China in October 2004 I was deaf, dumb and illiterate so I had to find a teacher and finally I got one and pretty quickly and a right one – Xu Jie or Jane as she has a English name too – and right one because she is a teacher for foreign adult students – people with thick dull brains who takes centuries to learn Mandarin and she is fluent with modern as well as ancient Chinese and Japanese too.