I knew no Chinese 8 months ago and now easily chat with friends on wechat, can read childrens books and get the gist of a newspaper. How?

Download pleco dictionary, upgrade to premium (so you can used spaced repetition flash card shows) and work your way through the HSK character set. This is great for recognition but it doesn't help you understand grammar structures so once you can recognise the HSK 1,2,3, and 4 character sets (about 1200 characters)  or maybe a bit earlier, start reading childrens books but continue with the flashcards as well.

The HSK card sets are very heavy on all of the common verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc but a bit light on nouns, especially proper nouns. For those I use an app called fun easy learn chinese, it has a few mistakes but its pretty good.

The most important thing is not to try and write the characters, just recognise them as it will require a huge amount of your memory and its not that useful especially today with pinyin inputs.

It is a hugely time consuming venture (I spent about 5 hours a day looking at flashcards for the first couple of months) but now I'm reading chinese translations of Tintin and other cool stuff its just enormously good fun.

Recognising the characters also makes listening a lot easier because most chinese TV shows have subtitles. If the speech is too fast but you can catch some characters its a lot easier to get the gist of what is going on.

Good Luck

In the same time, try to keep some sentenses in your mind. Actually, Chinese grammer is not very difficult, but that is also the reason why so many people think Chinese is not easy to learn. Because SEQUENCE is very important!!!!!
For example,
这本书我看了三天了。
这本书我看了三天。
First one means I finished this book in three days.
Second one means I have read this book for three days, but I still not finish yet.

And we Chinese use some words to show some relations(such as tense, voice...)
他正在唱歌。——He is singing.(正在)
我已经吃过饭了。——I have had supper.(已经，了)
他还没吃饭。——He have not have dinner yet.（还没）

我想去打球，但是我太忙了。——I want to play basketball, but(但是) I am too busy.
因为我没有时间，所以我没去打球。——I didn't play basketball because(因为) I am too busy.
So, you should try your best to remember some sentenses so that you can USE Chinese better.
last, of couse, practise more!!!

First of all, I want to let you know you know there are 6 ways to create Chinese charasters in the ancient time, and most of charasters are created with one of them is 形声（xing2 sheng1），形 means APPEARANCE and 声 means voice, so, characters made in this way tells us that one part repesent its voice, and other part repesent its meaning (BUT not all ).

For example~~

青qing1,green——请（言yan2，word+青）please——情（心xin1，heart+青）emotion——清（水shui3，water+青）clean…………………………

Then, you can put two or three or more characters together to make some more words.

For example~~

青—青色

请—请问，请求，请客

情—感情，爱情，友情，亲情，情人，情不自禁

清—清澈，清新，清静，清净，天青水蓝，清澈见底

………………

when I started studying Mandarin, I purchased the following book: Learning Chinese Characters: A revolutionary new way to learn and remember the 800 most basic Chinese characters by Alison Matthews and Laurence Miller. Then I joined Quizlet (quizlet.com) which is a flashcard deck website. I strongly suggest you do the same as well and you will be amazed how quickly your reading skills improve. And after all of that purchase several Chinese Breeze Graded Readers books.

As far as improving listening skills, you just have to practice. I hope you follow through with my suggestions. 祝你好运！

It's a big leap to read many sentences. I guess you have learnt radicals and someway proficient in writing common chinese characters. You can learn the most common 400 characters as a target first or you might know these already and so add the next 200 to 400. Filing in the gaps is absolutely normal and takes time.

I used to write short sentences in Chinese on social media and look up words I don't know on Pleco. That helps. Once I discovered how to pinyin input, my writing has decreased badly even though the messaging speed has increased. Usually the replies are a bit complicated for me to understand but it takes time.

If there is a character I want to look at further, I actually write it out in Pleco and get an idea of the stroke order. Then I look at the pinyin. I am not sure looking up the pinyin straight away on computer will help memorisation of the character. If I really want to remember properly, there is no other way but use a pen and paper and copy it out a few times. I probably cannot remember how to write the full word a couple of days later but character recognition for reading improves dramatically.

There was a really nice article on italki about listening skills recently

http://www.italki.com/article/533/improve-your-passive-listening-skills#.VkrLEKTGkt8