[gexla]

I suggest Chinesepod. The service is relatively cheap, there are a ton of resources for learning there and the podcasts are generally much more interesting than Pimsleur and other methods. I signed up for Chinesepod a little bit before I took a college class for Mandarin and I believed Chinesepod to be better for learning the vocab and characters. The college class was obviously better for pronunciation and real conversation because we had a great instructor and podcasts don't give feedback. You could supplement Chinesepod with remote conversations and tutors though. I believe they also have a network for this sort of thing. It's the cheapest option I know of.

If you have no funds at all, then you could probably find people willing to have conversation with you for free through the net and teach you some things in exchange for you offering the same with English.