Characters

To-date, I’ve only dabbled with characters, so I don’t yet know what constitutes an effective way to learn them.

A book named, “What’s in a Chinese Character” by Tan Huay Peng provides a good introduction to the how and why of characters. Here is a page from it:

The characters are presented in a compositional manner. For example, 女- woman, and 子-child are presented first, followed by a character which is created by combining both these elements: 好–good.

This is different than the functional approach which seems to be common in children’s books. The functional approach clusters items that we associate with each other – such as cat and dog, for example - regardless of how similar or different their characters are.

Memorizing hundreds of characters seems like a daunting task, regardless of the method. I’ve read that somewhere on the order of 2500 are required to achieve a reasonable level of reading and writing fluency.