Anyone here do Chinese?

[Hogwarts9876]

How do you learn characters? What I do at the moment is put them on cue cards, try and make clues for the characters that describe their parts (and maybe make a picture out of them if one comes to mind), then copy out lines of them until I remember. I feel like there might be a less time consuming way... I ended up spending hours writing 20 pages of characters (2-3 lines each for 40-50 characters) as exam revision, which seems kind of stupid and was pretty boring. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Brother Oni]

How do you learn characters? What I do at the moment is put them on cue cards, try and make clues for the characters that describe their parts (and maybe make a picture out of them if one comes to mind), then copy out lines of them until I remember. I feel like there might be a less time consuming way... I ended up spending hours writing 20 pages of characters (2-3 lines each for 40-50 characters) as exam revision, which seems kind of stupid and was pretty boring. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Unfortunately the way I was taught was the repetition method. Depending on the character, you could work on identifying the radicals and/or just simply practicing your calligraphy (assuming you were shown the correct order of strokes) to break up the monotony.

Depending on your learning style, making pictures may be helpful for you to remember (it is what the characters originally represent after wall), so you may want to look up how children are taught characters since they're also very visual.

http://ppalme.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/18198ac.jpg

I can't offer much more specific advice as all I know are the traditional characters rather than the shorthand ones you're probably learning.