Just flashcards and studying honestly, and FluentU has a free trial for 14 days you can try if you want

I have to agree with LesbianLiberty, the best way is to practice as much as you can. A lot of learners also tend to give up learning how to write characters (I did this as well), but in my opinion this is a mistake: repetition, practice and exposure are you biggest weapons.

I recommend Pleco for fasttracking and reviewing. Not only it is a great dictionary, but it also has a flashcard system and other goodies. Some people really like Anki as well, but I personally find Pleco to be the most convenient and easy to use.

Many learners reccomend using flashcards like anki or some kind of spaced repetition software.

You might also try looking into the "Remembering the Hanzi" books, which are fairly controversial, but some people swear by them!

in my experience the muscle memory you get from writing them a bunch of times just can't be matched

those sheets with 20 boxes and the first character is filled in and you copy it 19 times

你好，同志！I'm really happy you decided to embark on the adventure that is learning Chinese. I hope in this community we can all improve together.

Regarding the tones, I do believe they are really important to build a good foundation, but I also think it all depends on your needs and goals. Do you really want to talk with natives, go to China, etc? Then study tones seriously. You don't have these plans in the short-term? Then relax, enjoy the learning experience, and get your tones slowly, don't stress about them.

I think the two channels featured at the beginning of the thread are great:

• Kevin in Shanghai
• 杰里德Jared

Their videos have English subtitles, both speak perfect Chinese, they make entertaining comedy sketches, and with them not only will you learn Chinese, but you will also learn about China.

那年那兔那些事 (Year hare affair) is a mandatory watch for any comrade. I think you will like it specially, It's an anime about the Communist party of China and the birth of New China. Super useful to learn modern Chinese history (Japanese invasion, PRC-ROC war, Korean war, etc), and super cute, interesting and entertaining.

Not many doujin users make content with English subtitles, I recall CGTN, if you are interested in news about China.

那欢迎来到这个帖子！有一天你可以跟我练习一下汉语。

很可惜, 我從小學的是繁體字… 大概都看得懂檢體,可是沒辦法寫, 有一點不好意思

第一：最近我非常忙，所以我没有时间回复你或者别人。

第二：别担心，大部分中国人会读繁体字。但可悲的是，我是一位外国人，所以我不会。你和我的问题相反，繁体字对我十分难。

Don’t think it’s something I can unlearn at this point in my life, unfortunately.

我确定你可以学写简体字。Don't give up!

Also my Chinese is probably filled with bad habits/ABCisms/Chinglish from growing up in an immigrant family.

别着急，我不是一位汉语为母语的人，我不能注意到。

平常不太喜歡用中文溝通, 因為每次都覺得像個十歲小孩在講話

你的汉语对我没有问题。有时候我觉得我说话像我老师一样。

Don't let your Chinese lapse, I'm sure many comrades will be happy to practice here with you, me included.

Write as much as you want, don't feel shy about it. Even if the 汉字 are 繁体, nowadays we have technology that can easily convert the characters, don't let that stop you.

I hope I see you again in this thread, comrade.

Come with us and let's find out together, comrade ^^.

If you are interested in learning Chinese me or others can provide you with some initial resources that might help you.

I half assed my way through a semester of french and I was getting better at reading it but trying to do the oral exams was painful

I think the biggest help when it came to reading was reading something you know like the back of your hand but in the language you're learning really helps. I played Skyrim in French lol

Start with the Hello Chinese app. It’s like Duolingo but tailored for Chinese.

do duo lingo

I hope we see you here often, comrade.

hang in there, it's steep at first but once you get the tones down you start learning really fast. since a lot of redundancy usually provided by grammar is covered by tones the grammar is fairly simple (no verb conjugation whatsoever) and the word order is a lot like English

the characters look very wild at first but within a few months you'll see they are made of building blocks and often contain phonetic hints

我上高中的时候写汉字写的不错。大学生不用写字，就得打汉字。老师教我很多生词，可是一个汉字我都不能写。 😭

Jeez I probably butchered that. I really need to review my textbooks during break. 🙃

I use it too, definitely a must have for every Chinese learner.

欢迎来到这个帖子。^^

Ay lmao. 谢谢你的分享，我笑了。

还是 would be the correct term here :). 我是一位外国人。

I prefer not to mention the uni name, but it's an important one in Beijing.

I'm studying an undergraduate degree, but I would certainly recommend full-time courses for language learners. The more you can expose yourself to the language, the better!

我想他应该是一个外国人

So, you’re telling me that each character has radicals (and other components), which by themselves have a meaning

Yep, for example 相 is the combination of 木 and 目. 木 means wood, and 目 means eye. You can find these radicals in a lot of characters: 校, 看, etc.

are combined with other radicals for meaning and sound, to form a character that has meaning (logographs), and then you combine characters (sometimes just for their sound) to have yet another meaning?

Not exactly. Sometimes characters and radicals are combined because they hold some kind of relationship (for example 木+木=林), and some times because the character looks like the real thing it is trying to represent (for example 鸟), but most of the time we actually don't know the exact reason why they were combined.

When combinations happen, sometimes the character takes the sound and/or some small implied meaning of its components/radicals, and sometimes it doesn't. For example, the radical 氵 in 洗 indicates that the character's meaning is related with something about water, and that is true. But in the case of the character 法, it doesn't take the implied meaning of water, nor the pronunciation of either 去 or 氵.

I mean, I get it. It’s like ‘man’ and ‘manslaughter’ but with the addition that ‘m’, ‘a’, and ‘n’ all had separate meanings.

No, radicals don't give the character its meaning, radicals are just visual cues that can help you figure out the characters meaning and/or sound (and sometimes they can't, as you can see in the example I gave you above). For example, 想 is composed by 相+心, and it's meaning has nothing to do with the meaning of its components. The meaning of the character doesn't change according to the radicals/components it contains.

I’m just wondering when Chinese will start putting in spaces between ‘words’. Probably when enough words become more than a single character, I suppose.

In Chinese, spaces aren't used most of the time. I think you are confusing words, characters and radicals.

• 家人 is a word that means "family member", it's composed by two characters.
• 家 is a word and a character, it means "home".
• 人 is a word, a character and a radical, it means "person".

• Word: can be either one character that can stand by its own and still have meaning (家), or a combination of different characters that when put next to each other form a meaning (家人)
• Character: visual representation
• Radical: common visual cue in characters

Anyway, don't think too many about radicals, they aren't really important for learning characters/words. Focus on learning characters/words.

I hope I helped, comrade.

In my ears the difference is really clear, but don't worry, it's actually normal for beginners to not be able to distinguish the differences between some phonemes. I have passed the HSK6 exam and I'm currently study a degree in a Chinese university, and I still find hard to tell the difference between zu and cu. My best advice is: relax, hear a lot of Chinese, and give it time. Learning is a process, you will get there, but don't stop practicing, and most importantly, don't stop hearing Chinese.

Edit: I also recommend you to try practicing with the same phonemes 笑(xiao) 绍(shao) but in a different tone (in this case 4); try to see if you can hear the difference.