You can speak but you can't read? Everybody on this site who is learning Chinese wish they were in your shoes? Imagine if you can learn Chinese just by learning to read because you already speak? Learn the characters that children learn ... or learn the most common characters first.

Learning to recognize is a good first step because it will take years to learn to write. But learning to recognize will not take as much time and since you will mostly write in text messages, then learning the pinyin for the words that you already can speak should be easier.

It's a little harder for Cantonese because he though Cantonese does have pinyin too, most people write using their hand when they type on a phone.

So think of it this way: you are only learning the pinyin for words you already know and you are only learning the associated character for words you have spoken for years.

I'm probably in the same boat as you are. I dont speak traditional Mandarin but I speak Cantonese and do not know many chinese characters. I've been reading up on a lot of opinions on learning chinese characters and there are a some that stand out to me. Asian countries and Foreign countries teach Chinese Characters differently. In Asian society, children start with words like dog, cat, mom, dad, regardless of the level of difficulty how the word is written because they have a limited vocabulary as children. However, in foreign countries, like the US, they have developed a way to learn chinese character far more quickly, in the forms of radicals. Once you master writing radicals you can pretty much form any words you want. There is no rocket science in this as you give a name to a radical by how it looks. Eventually you will get to words that contain 3-4 radicals and you form sentences that connect each radical based on the way they look. For instance, there is word "special" in Chinese that combines the word "cow" and the word "temple". If you can make a sentence like the following; In India, monks that live in temples consider cows to be special dieties and are forbidden to be killed and eaten; you might remember how the word is written if you can form a mental picture of it. It definitely takes a lot of getting use to and practice as I'm starting on the journey to learn kanji which is similar to Chinese but in Japanese. There is somewhat of a drawback to the method involved as this will only teach you the meannig of the word but not necessarily how to say it. You will have to find other ways to incorporate that. If you are interested in learning chinese characters, I would recommend Helsigs book, its kanji chinese but i would say 90% of those words are actually used in Chinese.

Hi Tina,

There is a textbook called <em>500 Basic Chinese Characters</em> that you can use to learn characters. It introduces each character with how to write, what it means and some words with this character. 

This is the page on Amazon to purchase it: http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Chinese-Characters-Zhou-Guijie/dp/7800524604

Also, some people have made flashcards according to this book on Quizlet (a website for language quiz). You can use it to do practice. Here is the page: https://quizlet.com/3871201/book-500-basic-chinese-characters-flash-cards/

Please be free to contact me if you have any other questions.

just read more and more wharever you are into.

I suggest you to look for a cute Chinese friend, and ask her to teach you~

It requires you two can meet each other almost everyday~ then you can practice with her everyday!!! 

明白了吗？ 哈哈