Learning to write the 3,000 most common Chinese characters by hand, from memory, is by far THE most straightforward part of learning Chinese, so there's no reason to put it off. Achieving this goal in a few months does require a lot of stamina, a lot of imagination, a plan and lots of discipline to stick to the plan, but YOU CAN DO IT. Here I'll outline a plan for you to follow:
Heisig's Remembering Simplified Hanzi
This is the book series I used to learn to write the top 3K hanzi. You can get the English versions from Amazon or the Spanish editions (Language scaffolding, anyone?) from Editorial Herder in Spain. Get both volume 1 and volume 2 together. Don't waste too much time trying to decide between Traditional and Simplified: If you have a 1-year work contract in Taiwan or Hong Kong or if you're a linguist, get the Traditional editions. Otherwise, get the Simplified editions. The difference between both is not that big, and you can always learn the other after becoming proficient in one. That's what natives do.
Heisig's method is really simple: Most characters are made up of parts called components, so you just need to to come up with little stories to help you remember the characters. There's no need to stick to actual etymologies for this: You can come up with crazy stories for yourself. "It doesn't matter if the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice", Deng Xiaoping famously said. The more graphic you can make these stories in your mind's eye, the better.
A SMART goal
Back in 2004 I was learning Japanese, so I had already used Heisig's method to learn 2,000 Japanese characters. This gave me a head start with Chinese, but, since I had already forgotten a lot of characters (I never really used my Japanese) and many, many characters are different or have a different meaning due to historic reasons and the simplifications made by the PRC, in 2015 I had to sit down and start to seriously learn the Chinese hanzi. I set for myself a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound): I used a spreadsheet to plan where in the book I should be in any given date. At first I was breezing through the easier characters, but then I slowed down to 20 characters per day. I completed my task in less than 6 months from June to December, and not only memorized the writing but also the main reading of each character (more about memorizing readings in a future post). I was spending 3, 4 or even 5 hours per day in this crazy task, if you count the Anki reviews. I'd recommend 10 new characters per day or even less to those new to Chinese characters. But please, DO IT. "Do, or do not. There is no try", Yoda said.
KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
Some people will recommend you not to learn the writing in isolation, but instead try to learn an unwieldy lump of pronunciation, writing and several meanings at the same time. DON'T listen to them. Stick to Heisig's recommendation. "Divide and conquer", they say. At first, you must ONLY learn to write each character from Heisig's English keyword, even if the character has other more common meanings. This keyword will work like an "Unique identifier" in your mind to help you not to confuse the character with similar ones. For example, if there are several italki users with the same screen name and with no picture, you would check their user ID numbers to tell them apart. Heisig's keyword IS THAT ID NUMBER, but instead of a number it's something a bit more memorable. Don't worry too much about this ID not being the main meaning of a character: Once you're familiar with the character used in different words, Heisig's keyword will fade away from your memory and in its place a more general idea or concept will emerge. It's just like the dissolvable clips and stitches used by surgeons: They're only there until new tissue grows.
Of course, if you can already speak Chinese, it might be helpful to add some character's pinyin to the question side of your flashcards, to help you tell apart characters with similar keywords. You can also add the common Chinese name for characters: For example, 雷 is commonly called 打雷的雷 (dǎ léi de léi ). (Yup, that's my Chinese surname).
(...to be continued)
