How To Improve My Chinese?

Freezing cold these days! I miss the tropical heat of South Asia. I finally called my mom to asks how she might be spending Christmas this year. Hope she comes to China. She asked about my brothers, whom I haven't heard from either, and so I told her that her guess was as good as mine. Then she asked if my little brother is finally in a class to learn Mandarin Chinese. I told her that I wasn’t sure, last I heard he wasn’t, but that was a few weeks ago. After more talk about hoping to see her come to Beijing one day, we said good-bye and hung up the phone. I was suddenly overcome with a strange feeling of guilt. This time, it wasn’t over making a call I was worried my mom wasn’t going to get, but over my own Chinese skills. After all, I’m the one in Beijing, where they “speak it right.” It’s finally happening, my fears of excess expectation, but instead of my dad, it’s coming from me.

Now that my oral Chinese is better, I get a persistent feeling of the need to improve on it, and I still keep asking myself, “how to learn Chinese?” How to study Chinese in such a way that will take me even further without having to join another Chinese language course.

I’ve heard of schools using Chinese learning software as a modern teaching technique. But which kinds of Chinese learning materials really work, and how do you know which ones work best for you? I think there are too many Chinese schools in Beijing! Not only are there Chinese learning institutions but even universities in Beijing alone offer Chinese language learning programs. Normally people choose schools they hear more about, but lately it’s becoming more evident that not all schools you hear about are great; they just happen to spend more time doing their marketing. So who and how do you know which to trust? I want to improve my Chinese, but am I better off self-studying?

Another part of me is thinking, maybe I should try to learn a different language. Like Spanish! When I told my dad about Spain and my plan, he wasn’t as excited (at all) and said that everyone is doing business in China, and that I must learn Chinese in Beijing, where they spoke the "real" Putonghua (Mandarin)! Well now, I can speak Mandarin, but I still sure can’t speak any business Chinese.
Right now, my baby brother is probably the only one in my family who hasn’t had official Chinese language training in China (like me, he had a useless one outside the country), and so my grandfather, who doesn’t speak Mandarin himself, would constantly tell him to join a Chinese language course to make him learn to speak mandarin. But my brother has actually had his own Chinese crash course lesson whenever he was out flirting and playing with the local Chinese down where we lived. I envy that he seems to be soak up the language faster than I did in the beginning.