My experience learning was both challenging and very fun. I have about a 3,000 character vocabulary and was writing 5,000 word essays at the end of my time in China. I'd stress that you odn't need to take it to that point in order to be functional, verbally fluent, and get a lot of credit for having learned arguably the world's toughest language (or top 5... let's leave that debate out).
I'd say that unless you have a chance to live in CHina for 6 months or more at some point in the next few years, then it might not be worth the time. I learned in Canada for 2 years before going to China, and it did help learning some beforehand, but if you want it to become something that is a part fo your life/career/business then you really need the immersion experience. As you've seen in this thread, you can learn spanish "from home" so to speak, which is a pro in some ways.
Tones are a "you get it or you don't" thing. You either have good tones from day 1, or nothing... I've never actually seen someone actually improve their tones past the first few months of learning. It's got something to do with musical ability - having an "ear" for things.
Living in HK is indeed lousy for my Chinese! People here can speak it, but they don't *want* to speak it with you. So if you want to learn the language, go to the mainland or Taiwan.
Reading and writing is the kicker. If I had to be perfectly honest, trying to pick it up in any serious way precludes fastlane endeavour. I have spent thousands of hours on rote memorization over the years.
That being said, what's much more realistic is taking the course, doing the basic memorization required in early stage mandarin, and use that as a jumping board for a larger focus on speaking. I don't think going for "full literacy" is necessary at all - In fact I'm convinced it's not. You'll get 99% of the credit and usefulness from being verbally functional.
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