You might want to check out http://www.chinese-forums.com. There are a lot of information available. I also found another site http://www.chinese-forum.net recently. This one seems to be fairly new, not sure how active it is.

You can use search or a website. You can be more specific. Mandarin oranges or what?

I am learning Mandarin myself. It isn't easy. It's free for a podcast, you can try www.chinesepod.com, but the website was down when I checked right now. It will surely be up again soon.

Plenty of other free resources on the web:
Check out http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese for beginner resources and links to other free sites.
http://www.zhongwen.com is a good, free dictionary, and also has links to other free sites.
There are so many other free sites. Over a million hits for a Yahoo! search of "learn" "mandarin" "online" http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=learn+mandarin+online&rs=1&fr2=rs-top&ei=UTF-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&fr=moz3, but it might be helpful to actually go to a Chinese speaking country (like me) to learn. It's actually very cheap to study in Asia compared to schools in America or Europe.

If you're willing to pay but not travel, you can try http://www.livemandarin.com/ which will hook you up with a live teacher in China via Internet voice-chat.

About.com has many useful links, lessons and forums for learning languages.

I have given the link below:
http://chineseculture.about.com/library/symbol/blccbasics.htm

I use the french section in About.com and it is useful to me.:)