you can learn from simple words or simple words we can use in our daily life.things such as日月水火土木山石田土方，and there are many Simple but full of artistic poetic beauty to improve the interest in chinese. things such as chinese ancient poetry :白日依山尽，黄河入海流。欲穷千里目，更上一层楼。and so on.but don't try to get memory of complicated words! i remenber when we are learning ,we are taking on this way.if you can get a China's primary book ,it could not be better!

Of course every little stroke counts in Chinese characters, for example "日" means “sun” or “day”， while “目” means “eye”. The meaning changes with one more horizontal rightward stroke in the square. Of course these two are the simplest examples. In contrast to English, Chinese characters are logograms, you cannot predict how to write a character through its pronunciation. But still there are some regular things such as the radical “ 氵” meaning "water". So characters with this radical will do something with water or liquid, such as "河" meaning “river”, "流" means “flow”, “泪” meaning “tears”. There are pictograms in Chinese. This kind of characters look like the object which the character denotes, for example "月" looks like the moon. There are also ideograms such as "泪" mentioned above, it is the combination of eye and water, liquid from eyes is tears. Chinese is complicated system but it is interesting so if you have any problem you can ask me.

that need practice,

I suggest you practicing every single stroke respectively,then combing them together to form different words.Plus:different words also need practicing repeatedly.As a Chinese, I was taught to do so in my primary school.It takes a lot of time,but it will work.^ ^

when I look at French people writing by hand,I really don't know what they wrote~you see more,you just know what they wrote~