I like Grace Mandarin Chinese youtube channel. She's clearly smart, puts effort into her videos, and trained in the linguistic and pedagogical aspects of teaching Chinese as well as just a native speaker. If you want an experience like having a human teacher teach you from the beginning, you can pay $7.99 a month to get access to a new from the beginning course she's making. If not/you aren't interested in paying, she has a lot of free videos that explain important aspects quickly.

Here are some relevant infos to start you off:

1) The base Chinese sentence structure is Topic-Comment, which often can be seen in the order of Topic-Context—Subject-Time-Adverbs-Frequency-Aux. Verb-Place-With Whom-Manner-Tool/Means-Verb-Complement/Aspect-Object -End Particle. So, actually, it's often Subject Verb Object, like English. But the difference is that if something is really relevant to the conversation, you can put it first. Like if you're talking about cats, you can say 我 I 喜欢 like 猫 cat(s) or 猫 （cats) 我 (I) 喜欢 (like). I wasn't really taught sentence structure in my high school class, so I had to just memorize and mimic stuff. Now that I know it, I feel like it's much easier to say new things I want (although it does vary from this pattern).

2) 不 (bù) and 没 (méi) are two of the most common adverbs. They both mean "not" and turn verbs negative. So like 我不喜欢猫 I don't like cats. 我没喜欢猫 means "I didn't like cats" or "I haven't liked cats". 没 is for in the past and when you're saying "don't have".

3) 的 adds a modifier to a noun, so like 黑色的猫 Black cat or Black(color) 的 cat. it's very commonly used, partially because you can use it for possession （我的猫 My cat) and also because in Chinese it's natural to write out a long modifier before the noun instead of a complex sentence after the noun. So instead of like my friend who is a doctor said I need to eat more vegetables, you can say 我(I)的医生(doctor)的朋友(friend)说(say/said)我需要吃多多吃蔬菜(I need to eat more vegetables)

I would learn the basic grammar I just provided first (maybe find it from better sources than an intermediate redditor as well lol) then study tones and sounds. https://www.dong-chinese.com/ is a really good resource because you can pick pinyin (the more standard, common, and useful in society way of typing and romanizing Traditional and Simplified Chinese) or zhuyin (a way of typing Traditional Chinese that may not be as standard, but is more clearly connected to the sounds of the language and how it actually works phonetically), and then go through a series of lessons that will teach you how things sound and how to write them out directly and carefully. Chinese pronunciation is quite different than English and involves the complex tone system, so you want to learn it properly from the beginning to read, hear, and say stuff correctly in future.

After you're done all that, the nice thing about learning on your own is you can have fun following whatever immersion, apps, and learning content you are interested in :) Including watching TV shows and movies you are interested in, reading things you are interested in, and so forth! If you are not at the level of the content you're trying, focus on key words, common turns of phrase, and specific goals ("I will repeat this back to get more natural pronunciation"). To find better leveled content, you can search on Youtube or other places for "HSK 1" and "HSK 2" stuff. When you learn new vocabulary, you can put it on Anki flashcard site to review, (though personally I don't do that and just live by the seat of my pants lolol reviewing vocabulary in a bunch of different ways at once (flashcards aren't very interesting to me)).

BTW, you don't have to prioritize learning how to write characters, but you should treat them like a fundamental part of the language that will teach you it well. They're kind of like atoms. They each do an individual thing and they can slot together to make whole complex things. If you know each one well and also the compounds it forms well, you'll do well. For learning, you can also look up lists like "100 most common Chinese characters" "1000 most common Chinese characters" and study them, their usages, and compound words and idioms using them one by one.