I've been following Greg's progress over at Mandarin Segments for a few months now, and he's always talking about his progress learning Chinese characters. One approach he's taken is following the Heisig method.
If you're not familiar with the Heisig method, it's pretty simple. You learn to associate a story with each character, by breaking it up into smaller pieces (radicals / primitives). Recalling the stories is supposedly a lot easier for the brain, so it makes memorizing the thousands of necessary characters a piece of cake.
Well, I've heard similar suggestions from other people in the past and had already been doing it a bit with some characters. For example, the word for "cry" is:
哭 (kū)
If you look closely - it appears to be two eyes, with a nose and mouth, and in the upper right is a tear coming out of the eye. Once you have this sort of visualization, you never have a problem recalling it.
A few weeks ago, Greg pointed out a link to download the first few pages of book 1 of Heisig's simplified Character reference. You can get it here. A few days ago I downloaded it and have already gone through about 40 characters. I think I can finish the PDF before the end of the month, by which time I'll have an extra 100 characters memorized. Then, I'll need the book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0824833236?ie=UTF8&tag=mandasegme-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0824833236
I'll update my progress with simplified characters on a regular basis.
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