As a Vietnamese speaker I think learning Chinese is way more easier than those westerners, since nearly every Chinese characters can be transliterated into a từ Hán Việt and there are so many cognates. In regard to remembering the shapes of the characters, it's better to understand the basic meaning of each common radicals before you are trying to remember the entire character. For example, characters with 单人旁 (亻- single man radical) usually mean it's something about a human, e.g. 你、他、们，三点水 (氵- three dots water) is usually something about water, e.g. 江、河、湖、海、沉、浮、泡、沫。By understand all their meanings it's a lot easier to memorize. It's just like when you understanding the meaning of all roots of a English word, even you haven't seen the whole word before, you might still be able to guess the meaning correctly. With Chinese you can even guess the pronunciation of some words. e.g. 们、湖。

Here is a list of all common radicals and their basic meanings in English:

http://www.archchinese.com/arch_chinese_radicals.html

And here is a dictionary which can lookup the từ Hán Việt word for a specific Chinese character:

https://hvdic.thivien.net/ It's sometimes not quite stable though.

https://en.wiktionary.org is also a very nice dictionary for looking up the relationships between Chinese Characters and những từ Hán Việt.

From my personal experience of learning Vietnamese, I would look up any Vietnamese chữ in a word to see if it has a respective Chinese character, it helps me a lot for understanding the meaning of it. In fact, some of my Chinese learning Vietnamese friends said that learning Chinese is actually helpful for then to understand there native language Vietnamese better.

Chinese might not be the easiest language to learn, but it's definitely worth your effort. Wish you good luck in learning the language!