Thank you all for those encouraging words. Tidori san thanks for you detailed explanation, so many informative points. These are the points of t language i am interested in Reading radicals and other techniques are very interesting. I'll approach learning hanzi more carefully armed with the knowledge.

As a Chinese, I learnt to write when I was in Grade 1, at about 7. I still remember the first part in the textbook is pinyin but it has less to do with writing than reading. After leaning pinyin, I started to write the first characters, most of which are hieroglyphic. For example, 日(the sun),月(the moon) 口(the mouth), 土(the soil, a mound), 一(one), 二(two), 三(three), 人(human), 木(wood,tree)....later I learnt more difficult and complex character. But luckily, some of them are associative characters. For example, 明(bright) = 日(sun) + 月(moon). 休(take a rest)= 人(human)+木(tree). Some of them are shape-sound characters. For example, 吐(spit out, throw up)= 口(mouth, the shape part) + 土(mound, the sound part). The shape part indicates it has relationship with the mouth. Here 吐 and 土 sound the same. However, for a shape-sound character, it does not always sound the same with its sound part. Generally they have the same vowel. In fact, there are many other characters which do not follow any of these rules although some of them once followed one of these rules, because some of the characters are now much different with their original shapes as they have been always changing and evolving for thousands of years. With the help of pinyin, you can easily read a new character out. A character is composed by some strings. To write a character, we write these strings in a fixed consequence. Of course, if you don't follow the consequence, you can also wirte it. But it's not recommended. The basic rule is from left to right, from top to bottom, from inner to outside. Good luck~~

Learning mandarin really like to say that your mother in that practice would be best, refuels!

I agree, pinyin is the place the start. There must be a website somewhere where you can look at the pinyin and listen to a recording pronounce it. This should help you identify the sounds and start imitating them. Don't get bogged down in the trap of trying to learn Chinese with only pinyin, though. Truly, learning to read/write is the "hard" part of Chinese, much more so than speaking, but once you've put in the time you'll not only open up a world of literature and a ton of the internet, but it'll make it much easier to learn new words later on.

I agree, pinyin is the place the start. There must be a website somewhere where you can look at the pinyin and listen to a recording pronounce it. This should help you identify the sounds and start imitating them. Don't get bogged down in the trap of trying to learn Chinese with only pinyin, though. Truly, learning to read/write is the "hard" part of Chinese, much more so than speaking, but once you've put in the time you'll not only open up a world of literature and a ton of the internet, but it'll make it much easier to learn new words later on.