Did you really just say mandarin or traditional?
mandarin and cantonese are the 2 main chinese dialects.
also, the methods of writing are simplifed and traditional, simplified was made to increase the literacy rate sometime around Mao and all the prgressive communist stuff

I speak some Mandarin due to where I grew up and taking it in school.

Mandarin is what most speak, so unless you want to like - go to Hong Kong, just learn Mandarin.

I recommend starting out learning some traditional and then transitioing into simplified (there are many shared characters and simplified just makes some of them faster to write) Traditional is dumb in the long run really.

As for where to start I'd say try to look for some software or a book that you can get cheap or for free and look up more stuff online.

some links from my high school Chinese/math teacher
http://learningchineseonline.net/
http://www.usc.edu/dept/ealc/chinese/newweb/character_page.html