1. Study PinYin: Pinyin is like phonetic symbol in English. If you are fluent in Pinyin, you can know how to pronounced the character.

2. Remember the common character. That will help you learn in future. Because most words and phrases are made up of two character, at least. ^_^

3. Buy a good dictionary, you can look up any character by Pinyin. So you can know the meaning about the character or phrase.

4. Then, when you have some question, please ask Chinese people. ^_^

Finally, if you learn Chinese you will find that it is very funny. For example:

河：（he） That means River In English. but do know how to remember this character?

For the left one--- we Chinese always say it's San Dian Shui （three drop water）, you see, almost there is water in river.

For the right one--- that pronounced "ke" ( Pinyin ) but the whole character pronounced “he”. in fact, "ke" is very similar to “he”.

So, you rember it.^_^

Wish this reply can help you~ Good luck!