I'm a Mandarin native speaker from Malaysia. I can still vividly recalls those memory my my classmates and I read sentence by sentence from text books, loudly, after our Mandarin teacher. Moreover, our teacher also asked us to practice to write the characters and so we all had exercise books to practice the characters. Our teacher also asked us to copy essays. I would like to admit that that was quite tedious and sometimes deemed toil for us.However, it's the most effective way to pick up the characters. Once you master hundreds of characters, you'll find that it's quite easy for you to learn other character as there are close relationship between characters-they are not simply wilfully coined, but formed through a evolutionary process. You should also try to read mandarin text, although, perchance you can't pronounce the characters and understand it. The objective to perform this kind of nondescript task is to immerse yourself in the language- a pivotal process in learning a language and to give yourself more chances to encounter with more and more characters. Perhaps you would like to ask: What are the practicality if you can't understand or even pronounce it? Always remember we often master a word (in English) after encountered it several times in different texts, so it is akin to that of Mandarin. Alas, many people wouldn't do that because they think that is dull, in fact, it is. Hopefully my opinion can meet your needs. Thanks.

what Joseph said is really interesting and true. As a Chinese who has no need to speak English but only to read,we may even can't pronouns a English word or write it corretly,but can read them well. I think it is also because of the habit of our Chinese reading , writting and speaking way. So when trying to remember Chinese,spelling one character by one char ,just as the way to learnning other languages which have alphabeta ,may be not a proper method Remember each Character as a whole one,and make sure you can recognize them when you read them again.That is enough. I also cant write tranditional Chinese,but I can read it easily.

write them down a lot

Honestly, I don't think there is any such 'Best Method'. Because it was also a very big problem for us when we were kids, learning how to read and write characters at primary school. At that time, teacher always gave us assignments as transcribing the text 100 times! Lol, actually, 100 times is kind of inflated, but you can imagine. There's one thing, I honestly don't think most Chinese would 'confess' that we tend to forget how to write Chinese characters. That's because the more we use computers, the less we need to write by hand. So...but we can read very well, that's for sure, even most traditional Chinese characters. So from the practical aspect, to recognise is far more important than to write in person. That's just my personal point of view. Hope it helps.

hi, like durk suggested, you gotta know the different chinese radicals (bushuo) in order for you to find memorizing or recognizing chinese characters very easy. you may visit this site: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php :)