I really like the Princeton UP series that starts with First Step: An Elementary Reader for Modern Chinese by Chih-p’ing Chou, Jing Wang, and Jun Lei.

It’s this one: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691154206/first-step

It’s expensive but if you investigate online you may find a PDF for free.

The audio for the course is available online. There are links in the PDF version that take you straight to the website, so it is easy to match the audio with the chapters. The audio is in short clips for each chapter, so it is easy to repeat the audio and the short stories. Each chapter includes some grammar, vocabulary, and a short story; each short story is part of a long story that builds up across the book.

These books seem to be the books for a college-level course that starts from beginner and goes to advance. There are three books for ‘Year 1’, three for ‘Year 2’, three for ‘Year 3’, and five more books for ‘Advanced students’. It seems to be a progressive and well-paced course. I have only completed part of the first book, though, so I cannot say if it is good all the way through. Again, you may be able to find most of these books as PDFs.

HitChinese is good: https://www.youtube.com/@HitChinese/videos. She used to post more videos, but seemed to stop about a year ago. Still, there are 20-or-so videos to work through. I found them useful.

If you can understand some characters and pinyin, try: https://learningchinesethroughstories.com. There is a pop-up dictionary to help understand the stories. Some of the stories are Patreon-only :(

The LINE dictionary is helpful: https://dict.naver.com/linedict/zhendict/#/cnen/home.

Have fun studying Chinese!