Dear friend, according to my experience Chinese characters are difficult for Westen people, but many of them learnt well. The suggestions as followed:

1. Radicals. Usually I teach my students according to the radicals, because radicals are very very important for learning characters, and each radical has their own meaning. If you manage the radical meanings, you could make guess the characters meaning even you havn't learnt before. They are like prefix and suffix in English, they are the tool which you enlarge your characters vocabulary. You could choose some typical characters of one radical to learn, for example :the radical of warter, then you could learn 江河湖海....


2. Strokes Order. If you are learning how to write the characters, the important thing is writing order. I met many foreigners who always forget how to write characters even they have learnt many times. The reason is the writing order is not correct, the order they write is as they like but not follow the right order, so it is difficult to remember even for Chineses.

3. Just reading. You could learn how to recognize the characters first, then one year or half year later learn how to write them.

4. Buying a good book. Generally speaking I will choose some good books for my students. Usually they will including how some characters come to today's shape. Because you could know why we write the characters like this but not like that. Most of the students will say "WOW ...interesing! " "Amazing!" then you could find some fun in that.

5. Confidence. Many of foreigners are afraid of learning characters, they always say "I don't want to learn drawing pics", however, we still have many good examples, they learn characters very well!!! You also can do it, NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE! JUST DO IT! and you will enjoy it:) Good luck:)