Chinese characters are not rocket science. Over a billion people have learned these characters and they are not all geniuses. If you thought about the number of signs and pictographs you have already learned in life without anyone ever telling you to study them, you realize learning Chinese characters are not much different. You know the sign for poison, stop, Ford, Nike, Warning, etc. Now one difference with learning Chinese characters is Chinese characters are made up of individual parts called radicals. And these radicals often have their own sound and meaning. Just remember that people who focus on the degree of difficult of a task, rarely accomplish their goal. If I were you, I would first study the 180 individual radicals of Chinese. All characters in Chinese are made of these radicals. When you learn the radical, you can often guess the sound of characters you don't know and can sometimes, guess the meaning. Go to this awesome site and sign up for a free account. http://abcsofchinese.com/ Use Google browser because i found it works best Go to this youtube channel and see a demonstration of why you should learn radicals first. https://www.youtube.com/user/ABCsOfChinese

I have never learnt or memorised characters, but read at native level. Consider Victor Mair's views, who is a world expert on the matter: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=189 , also consider the use of web pages and tools such as mandarinspot.com/annotate and pleco to assist with this process, in the early stages.

Characters have roots like English word (such as re recycle ,ann annual) 犭狗 猪 is for animals 亻你 他 are usually means human It is important for you to understand the Characters' meaning , if you want to memorize them. And actually characters are structured by roots. I am not sure if I make it clear. 加油！^_^

It helps if you can associate the characters with something. Chinese people usually learn the history about a character. That is one method, but what you actually associate a character with doesn't matter. It can be totally fake. You can look at this two books: Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters ISBN-10: 080483816X Remembering Simplified Hanzi ISBN-10: 0824833236 Both are similar and use an associative method. I think both allow a peek on Amazon.com PS: Forget about older age, Kato Lomb started Hebrew in her 80's.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb

practice is no doubt the most important thing for a beginner，but there are still some skills to help u.let us take 歪 （oblique＝not upright）for the example.歪 is combined by 不 and 正.不 is not and 正 is upright.Is it very easy to remember 歪？only if u remember the basic part of every chracter.some parts have its own meaning.these meanings will create a new meaning.but not every character can be rememered this way.practice is most important thing to master a language