Learn the basic meaning of characters. About 4 percent of Chinese characters come from pictograms. If you can recognize these symbols, you can usually figure out what the whole character means. For example, 水 is the symbol for water, and when you combine 水 with 池, you get the word for pond, 水 池 (shuǐ chí). Other examples include --- (rì), which means sun, and 月 (yuè), which means moon.
Write each character 50 times. There are no shortcuts to learning Chinese symbols; you just need to memorize everything. The easiest way to do this is practice, practice, practice.
Say the character in a sentence as you write it. Remember, certain characters can have completely different meanings depending on the context. For example, 玆 (zī) can mean both herewith and now, or at this time.
Study the pinyin version of the character. Pinyin is a way of writing Chinese characters by using the English alphabet. Since Chinese is a tonal language, pinyin is very useful in helping you learn how to pronounce characters.