first,to learn the easy characters well enough, and then,step by step learn the harder ones. some characters like that is easy to remember: 天&口 -------make up----> 吞 亻&也 ---->他 亻&尔 ----> 你 日&十 ---> 早 艹&早----> 草 大&小 ----> 尖 木& 一 ---->本 木& a point ---->术 ......and too many such like this 多看 多写 ,也就记住了 :P

You really need to write them out for them to stick, in my experience (I've studied Japanese before and am learning Mandarin now). Unfortunately, there isn't a way to completely avoid that. There are some great websites that make it a little less painful, though- I use Skritter (just Google it), and it's very good. If you have one of those tablets that lets you write on your computer, it works great. Other things that have helped me have been learning some of the common radicals and their meanings, which can help you tell similar-looking characters apart and sometimes come up with stories and ways to remember them. Once you've learned some of the common characters, just practicing reading can help with recognition, too. Try to avoid using pinyin if you can; the longer you rely on it, the harder it is to switch to characters, IMHO.

It depends on what way of studying you prefer, but generally I would say, the best way to memorize a character is to write it over and over again, mentally assigning the meaning and sound to that character. Then, I would say, writing sentences with the character is a good way of integrating it into your written chinese.

There is no short cut but writing them again and again.

Yellowbridge has a nice character dictionary, here: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/chinese-dictionary.php You can enter a character (or pinyin, or English), and once you are displaying a character entry, click on the Etymology tab. That will show the origin of the character, such as if it is a combination of two other characters. For example if I put in nin2 (formal form of ni3), it shows that it is a combination of ni3 (you) and xin1 (heart). The character for nin2 is a ni3 over top of a xin1, and you can think of it as a heartfelt you, hence a formal you. So the etymology of the character gives you a natural memory aid to help in remembering the character as well as its meaning.