My son recently started showing interest in learning Mandarin thanks to some singing books sent by a friend of ours.
I made this tool to help us expand our vocabulary and enable us to communicate about every day stuff.
My favorite part as I dabble in Mandarin is that there is no verb conjugation! Grammar tends to be fairly simple, too, which means that you can start saying intelligible sentences quickly by picking up common words.
The toughest part so far is hearing and producing words with the right tones. To my untrained American ears, I often can't tell the difference between words that differ only in their tone. It's been helpful to see the words written in pinyin and spoken aloud using this communication board.
I shared some technical details here: