I used to hang out with foreigners for a couple of months and then learned the tactic to get the language....at first i just memorised these phrases
"hello"
"i dont understand chinese,speak english"
"you are very fit"
"would you like to see the bar i have at my place?"
"take this off"
and from then on it was easy,you use as much borken words as you can put together with conjunctions and you have urself a sentence...

then teach them women english and in return you learn chinese,in five years i just attended 3 chinese classes and my chinese was the best among all the foreign students...even most of my seniors...
Once i started taking it seriously it took me 6 months to master enough to make a long basic conversation...you just need to know the right way to learn any language and according to me u never learn a language in a classroom....
Ive seen other foreigners in china who are there for 6-7 years and still cannot speak chinese...to this day i get calls from china from my foreign friends who are having some sorta problem and want me to talk to the chinese person they are dealing with..