Needing some adoption advice please

Ok, my fellow international adoptive parents: I need some advice and I am looking for your comments. Please send me your thoughts and suggestions!

As we plan to travel to China to get our little girl, we are concerned about the language barrier and how we should be preparing to best meet her needs. My husband recently purchased a Rosetta Stone in Mandarin, so I decided to give it a shot at learning a new language. Let's just say that after about 30 minutes of total confusion on my part I decided to come back another day. I am NOT fluent in any other language, but did take a couple years of French in high school and have some Spanish speaking students in my classes at school. I can't imagine a language that is more difficult to learn than Chinese. We want to be able to communicate with her at least a little bit, but don't know how we will do this.

So, here are a few of my questions: Have you adopted an older child (3+) that has been in an orphange? Did he/she typically know any English? How did you communicate in those early days? Fortunately, love is a universal language, but we dearly want to be as prepared as possible so that we can make her feel as comfortable as possible.

I'm looking forward to your suggestions and comments!