I loved tokenshi's response:-)
My experience is fairly limited, but here are the things that helped me:
Practicing the strokes makes a huge difference in learning speed. My tutor provided me with a workbook that had pictures of the characters displaying the order and direction of the strokes, and I was asked to trace the characters at least 10 times each before copying them down. It seems monotonous at first, but pretty soon I built a frame of reference. The strokes became more familiar (even developing a sort of rhythm), which made the characters less intimidating.
Another thing that has really helped me is studying characters piece by piece. Once you know that the character for "rise"/"stand" combined with "sun"/"day" forms "sound", you can imagine how sound begins each day as the sun rises (birds singing, people waking, etc.) and use that to remember the character. Not all compound characters have such beautifully abstract logic behind their construction (some are a combination of theme and a phonetic, and some are just plain phonetic), but I find that most are adaptable to similar mnemonic devices.
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I loved tokenshi's response :-)
My experience is fairly limited, but here are the things that helped me:
Practicing the strokes makes a huge difference in learning speed. My tutor provided me with a workbook that had pictures of the characters displaying the order and direction of the strokes, and I was asked to trace the characters at least 10 times each before copying them down. It seems monotonous at first, but pretty soon I built a frame of reference. The strokes became more familiar (even developing a sort of rhythm), which made the characters less intimidating.
Another thing that has really helped me is studying characters piece by piece. Once you know that the character for "rise"/"stand" combined with "sun"/"day" forms "sound", you can imagine how sound begins each day as the sun rises (birds singing, people waking, etc.) and use that to remember the character. Not all compound characters have such beautifully abstract logic behind their construction (some are a combination of theme and a phonetic, and some are just plain phonetic), but I find that most are adaptable to similar mnemonic devices.