http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joël_Bellassen I am trying not to separate hanzi learning from pinyin. It seems you are creating more work in the future IMO. I would suggest you concentrate on the 400 suggested by Joel Bellassen.

ALL the characters? Good luck with that!

I advice you learn"pin yin" first.Once you know how do you speak "Pin yin",then it will be easy to recognize chinese characters and speak them out.You can try.It is useful.

Rome was not built in one day ! try your best ,good luck !!

I'm not good at that thing to be honest, thking up memorizing ways for foreigners. Maybe there is actually no shortcut to master it. Even chinese make errors now and then. But you can try further imagination, comparition, structural analysis...Since it is said that chinese characters are formed in three ways:象形法 会意法 形声法 指事法 Each character has its own long history. ...For the first case, 人,一,田,孕.水,....and the most popular one, 囧. For the second, 旦,明,羹,家...For the third,吧,把,爸,疤...For the fourth, 本,末,寸,亦,刃,上,下...Well, I'm not a linguist after all. I thought for a while about how I learned that time too. I just liked to practice handwriting. There are great many kind of wunderschoene chinesische handwriting which I appreciated a lot. Even a stroke, I would practice for hours, maybe that's a way of helping you find chinese characters more genial(the feeling a friend gives). I think no other language can make thier words an art to this extence! Chinese characters are quite flexible and wie Bilder. So I guess there will be some way to help memorizing them easier but mine is limited. And more? Just followed my primary school teacher.