I have played with Rosetta Stone through Wine. You cant use voice
support but you can go through the rest of the materials. I read
somewhere about using vmware for this too.

Systems > Preferences > Keyboard
Second Tab: Layouts.
Click ADD and then click Layouts and find China.

I put this on the top menu so when I was learning Russian. I could go
back and forth between us and russ keyboard layouts.

I use Google Translate. From the main Google screen, click on "more," then
"even more" and translate is near the bottom on the right.

I always translate a paragraph into Simplified Chinese, then translate it back
(using another tab in my browser) to make sure the meaning remains. Many
English words have multiple meanings, and computer-based translation can't
always guess which one you wanted.

You should ask your correspondent to do the same thing when writing emails in
Chinese.

Do enough of this, and you'll become really good at copy and paste.

I met my Chinese wife on the Internet, and we did hundreds of pages of emails
and chats before she came to live with me in Toronto, all of it using online
translation tools. (I also spent four months in China over a bit more than one
year.)