I'm probably in the same boat as you are. I dont speak traditional Mandarin but I speak Cantonese and do not know many chinese characters. I've been reading up on a lot of opinions on learning chinese characters and there are a some that stand out to me. Asian countries and Foreign countries teach Chinese Characters differently. In Asian society, children start with words like dog, cat, mom, dad, regardless of the level of difficulty how the word is written because they have a limited vocabulary as children. However, in foreign countries, like the US, they have developed a way to learn chinese character far more quickly, in the forms of radicals. Once you master writing radicals you can pretty much form any words you want. There is no rocket science in this as you give a name to a radical by how it looks. Eventually you will get to words that contain 3-4 radicals and you form sentences that connect each radical based on the way they look. For instance, there is word "special" in Chinese that combines the word "cow" and the word "temple". If you can make a sentence like the following; In India, monks that live in temples consider cows to be special dieties and are forbidden to be killed and eaten; you might remember how the word is written if you can form a mental picture of it. It definitely takes a lot of getting use to and practice as I'm starting on the journey to learn kanji which is similar to Chinese but in Japanese. There is somewhat of a drawback to the method involved as this will only teach you the meannig of the word but not necessarily how to say it. You will have to find other ways to incorporate that. If you are interested in learning chinese characters, I would recommend Helsigs book, its kanji chinese but i would say 90% of those words are actually used in Chinese.