For me, I downloaded a chinese deck from the shared Anki deck website. There's a series of ten of them. I also wanted to learn the strokes and how to say them and draw them, so I downloaded the "eStroke" app for my iPhone, and practiced drawing them in the air. Wasn't motivated enough to get ink and paper. :-) I also figured out how to do pinyin on my computer, and input strokes on the phone for character recognition. So, I dunno - I would do a few cards a day, but my retention was poor. I realized I was more interested in learning how to learn Chinese, rather than learning Chinese itself. And, doing the cards 10 minutes a day isn't enough - you have to be doing some sort of other activity with it simultaneously. I deleted the deck eventually. :)

Definitely - contact me at the email in my profile and I can tell you more about my specific approach for Mandarin. (Don't want to sidetrack the thread too much.)