I have to remind myself of the following strict order of learning:
ONE. learn words and expressions first by their pronunciation and their use in speech. write down the pinyin or bopomofo. look at the characters used to write that word (if available) to see if you already know any of them. if yes, this will help you remember. if no, don't even look at the characters any further. and I mean it: resist the temptation to discover something new! you might learn something interesting, but as arcane as the characters are, it is impossible to remember anything no matter how profoundly you investigate those characters. concentrate on using the words and expressions in oral first!
Obviously, you need to get your pronunciation right and need to use the word often in life or learning to remember it. hearing other people use it, will teach you more about different uses and shades of meaning. if all goes well, you have now learned a new word, that you can understand in listening and use in speaking. excellent! your Chinese has advanced. don't let the writing bother you!
TWO. if you find a word is written often, or you need to be able to read it, then study the characters which make up that word. But don't undertake this lightly: learning a character takes a lot more time then you think it would and trying to learn to many will make you confuse and forget them and all your time will be wasted. yes, wasted. I mean it. you can study half a day and not retain any result from that! figure what I meant by keeping yourself sane.
Now to start learning that character, take your Zipu or (
zhongwen.com) and find the components of the character. after the first couple weeks of learning Chinese writing you'll only know a ridiculously small fraction of useful characters, but at least you will quickly learn the most common component characters which is important to memorize more complex characters. The characters may have their origin as pictograms and ideograms, but of this is a useless fact when you try to memorize a character. it just doesn't help you to distinguish characters. instead, you will learn to see components and then you can memorise a single, composed character just be memorizing which are its parts. good thing: for the most complex characters there is often a clearly distinguishable largest component which gives the pronunciation for the entire character. but note: most characters which you learn are of moderate complexity and don't have that feature. as a cynical aside: the simplest characters which are easy to remember and often occur as components to other characters are not actually in use by themselves anymore.
So, now you have the components of a character which you want to learn. you commit them all (with pronunciation) to your study notes next to the character that you are trying to learn.
if you already know some of the components, that's great, it will make learning much easier! for those that you don't know, take half a minute to see if they are used to write another word, which you already know. in that case, there's a chance you might actually be able to remember that character, too. so add that word to your study notes. all the characters which are not listed as parts of words which you know, leave untouched! don't think you can just learn an extra new word from the dictionary unless you already know a lot of other words from that area. chances are that the word from the dictionary is a rarely used one and people will instead use a synonym, or that it's meaning and use are slightly different than you thought. it's usually a waste of time: new words are best taken from other people or real-life situations. the primary reason to write down all those component characters is to memorize their form, so that the work of memorizing the target character becomes less, or actually: becomes possible in the first place. besides, those components later help to the distinguish your character from new ones that you'll learn (because you can compare characters on a more abstract level) and they will also be of help to learn other characters which contain them (then you have part of the work already done).
The notes about component characters (and their pronunciation, just so you can say something to yourself while reading) will be your key to remember a character. your path leading to it, so to speak. don't expect too much: the components are not a logical explanation for a character, they are only a way to break characters down to something that links them to other characters, even if that link is often just random (and often by sound). to me, the components offer access to a character and turn learning to read from a sanity-destroying activity to a merely mind-numbing, tiring activity. if you keep your components clean, learning more characters doesn't become easier, but at least reinforces what you have learned before. if you do it without this essential abstract structure, I think you'd confuse the characters more and more, the more you learn them. anyway, it seems insane to me.
Once you can read the character, you will also be able to write it with a computer or cell phone using a pronunciation-based input method. on the computer it can be very easy because you can type an entire word and if that word is in the input method's dictionary, it'll give you the correct characters automatically. if the computer doesn't know the word or it's a one-character word, you'll have to select from a list and that's where you need your reading skills.
THREE. hey, now you can use a word or expression orally, you can recognize it in reading and type it on your computer and cell phone. I hope you have opportunity to do all those things, because otherwise you'll forget it again. note that when using an expression only in oral, you might still forget how to read it! both needs practice. reading has the benefit of practicing character recognition and word use. I don't have anything which I am able to read besides my text book, so I use that.
Now, you think that if you can read it and write it on the computer then you should also be able to write it by hand?! ha! what for? who writes by hand anyways? even many natives forget how to hand-write certain characters, now that computers are everywhere. Ok, I understand that you want to try it at least, so here's my advice.
for handwriting, I find that there are two separate skills involved and one of them is actually of a gentle nature: you notice your own improvements and you have good chances of actually keeping the skill over time with only little practice. the other skill is a recipe for insanity in my opinion. it takes vast amount of time. progress is hard to measure. sometimes it seems easy and to realize that you forgot it again, or that you got it wrong. you literally invest a huge part of your life and you have huge chances of forgetting large parts of it later. just because you don't practice hand-writing in real-life. and because it's so ridiculously hard. (I am just preparing another post which illustrates this with some examples...)
Now, here's the first skill, which I think you want to learn, once you spent so much time with Chinese anyways. it's the skill of copying! writing a character which you can see written somewhere. why is that a skill at all? because it takes practice, to get the proportions right! it also takes time to learn the stroke order. and you should learn the stroke order! it makes writing easier and also, once you are able to write very neatly, you can speed up writing by making less precise strokes, sometimes not lifting the pen between strokes and then the hastily written characters will look similar to other people's (normally hasty) written characters.
To learn this skill you just take a character that you already know how to read (and therefore know some words and expressions which use it), look up it's components in your notes, take a book or website that has the stroke order (where you can easily find the character and components with the pronunciation which you previously wrote down). and then you write all the components, each until it looks it, and then the character itself until it looks neat. it's important to practice both, because components have to be scaled properly. that is, squeezed horizontally or vertically until they fit and the entire think looks like one character. make sure that the components are aligned properly, touch each other where they should, and are very close where they don't touch. you'll notice that you improve. be happy about that! for this short moment of time, you can write the entire character, neatly, and without looking at your book. you might even write an entire phrase without looking. but don't think that's the skill you have learned. the more new characters you learn, the quicker you'll forget the old ones. your skill is not writing something you want to write (as it would be in any other language or writing system), it is merely to make a neat and correct copy of characters you can see written somewhere. that's the part that you have acquired for long-term use! the part that you won't forget if you keep it up with just a little practice.
Now for the second skill: learning to write the proper character, properly for something that you perfectly know how to say and just want to write. should be easy after all that effort and base of skills that you aquired by now, you think? maybe you are already used to reading menus, signs, even some subtitles on TV (or even the newspaper!?). that's all good man, but reading in the world of Chinese characters is just not writing. to properly recall and write characters you need to practice a lot. and forget again, and practice again. have the stroke sequence run through your head while you walk, shower, shit, eat, sleep. it's mind consuming, time consuming, in short: life consuming. it takes time during which you could practice reading, talking, listening, learn new words, do something fun, do something productive, ... think about it as a question of ressources: learning to write by hand just takes more time than you'd think and more time than any other comparably useful skill.
summary: talking first, reading second, with good choice of which characters you need to recognize, and then writing, choosing your target characters with extreme care or you'll just waste time.
