When I decided to undertake this goals to reach Mandarin mastery by the time I’m 30, I was part way through the HeCourse. This is a course created by a local here in Shenzhen. It focuses on skipping pinyin and going straight to characters, writing them, typing them and pronouncing them. The three units contain a total of 900 characters, and tonnes of sentences and phrases to go with.
Now, considering that there are 3000 characters required for HSK9, there will be a lot of work to do after this course. Still, I wish to complete this before moving onto the formal HSK system.