You have to pay to get beyond basic, but it's pretty good nonetheless...

[ssonicblue]

I was reading an article on how to "bridge the gap between classroom learning and actual speaking," with testimonies from several prominent folks about their experiences. One of them was a guy who apparently got so fed up with the low quality of such programs that he decided to create his own website: http://www.fluentU.com/ . I decided to give it a shot, and to my surprise, it's pretty great! The memorization scheme doesn't have you using flashcards, filling in sentences, or anything like that--instead, you just watch videos of native Chinese speakers, with subtitles in English and either simplified or traditional hanzi, and try to focus on learning what the words sound like and how they're used. Give it a shot, it's a lot of fun!

[linguaholic]

FluentU is really cool. We already had a chat on this subject here:

http://linguaholic.com/chinese-links/fluentu/

After all, did you pay for the service? (as far as I can see, the basic service is for free, (you mentioned that in the title).

[ssonicblue]

I haven't paid for it yet, but based on what I've seen of it from the basic version, I may ask for an upgrade for my birthday in a few months. It looks quite useful!