Reddit reviews Reading and Writing Chinese: Third Edition, HSK All Levels (2,349 Chinese Characters and 5,000+ Compounds)

Chinese language classes are probably your best bet, really.

There's really no good textbooks like some other languages you have. Westerners don't make any decent ones because it's not really in demand, and ones made in China are all absolute crap that think just straight up rote memorization will teach you a language.

Integrated Chinese is OK, but poorly suited for an independent learner. It tries to balance rote memorization with practical exercises, but fails to reinforce older lessons in new ones. You can still probably get some use out of it, though.

So really, I think the best option is then four-fold.

One -- learn some words/characters through rote memorization. I recommend using this book.

This book is in a sensible order that starts with simple components of characters first, then builds up more complicated characters, and so on. It will reinforce your study.

If you don't want to spend the money to get this book, then just get a words by frequency list from somewhere. Our focus here is getting a good set of useful words ASAP.

Be careful to learn actual words and not just individual characters.

Using Anki will really help in this process.

Two -- Meanwhile, start studying some Chinese grammar. I recommend this website. Don't focus too much on it, but Chinese grammar is pretty different from English grammar. Make sure you can make sense of the examples, and get a good sense of how the grammar works and all the parts of grammar so you can reference this site in the future if necessary. There's no need to study it intensively, though.

Three -- Since rote memorization is a horrible way to learn a language, this step is probably the most important. So focus on this one the most. It's simple -- after you know 300-500 or so words, get some graded readers, and start doing your best to understand them. I recommend Mandarin Companion.

At some point, earlier is better than later, go ahead and download the freely available archive of Chinese Pod. Start getting some listening practice. Ignore the criticism of old Chinesepod episodes about how the English host can't speak Chinese right or is a sexpat or whatever. You're here for listening practice, and wiring your brain to understand spoken Chinese is important, and AFAIK, there's no better archive of spoken Chinese suitable for a beginner.

Four -- Native content. Once you can understand Mandarin Companion well enough, start trying to read some actual native Chinese. Blogs, news, anything. Doesn't matter what. And same thing -- once you can make sense, about 80% of the wholly Chinese spoken Chinesepod, start trying to watch some Chinese movies, listen to Chinese radio, whatever. This is going to be hard as fuck.

Start listening to Chinese now, too. Chinese songs, Chinese movies, anything. Even if you don't understand anything, studies have strongly suggested that our brains will start learning to parse the sounds of languages we are frequently exposed to.

Try to copy what you hear even if you don't understand. Spout out gibberish and make it sound the best you can of what you heard. Learn one-liners. EXAGGERATE IT. Chinese is a tonal language with its own rhythm and patterns. Start familiarizing yourself with this the best you can. Copy it. I've been accused of, "you sound like you're making fun of Chinese people when you speak!" What they mean is they don't expect a white guy to actually sound like a Chinese. My Chinese American friends have gotten harassed by their parents because I speak Chinese with a better accent than they do. And my Chinese sucks and is atrocious. But you wouldn't know how limited my Chinese is by how I speak it, and I chalk that up to just mimicking what I hear.

Start talking to Chinese. Make deals, "I teach you English, you help me learn Chinese."

Congrats on taking on another language. Mandarin is not easy as far as phonetics go, but super easy when it comes to other things like nouns and verbs. To me measure words made far more sense than masculine and feminine and no conjugation tables!

Here are my tips:

• Find a Pinyin video if you don't have access to a native speaker.
  
  
• Memrise has some great courses on the 5000 most common characters.
  
  
• The Chineseskill app will help with sentences. It's pretty much Duolingo for Chinese. Laokang Tone Test is another really handy app.
  
  
• If you need mnemonics skip Chineasy and pick up Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters and Reading and Writing Chinese
  
  
• CCTV's Growing up with Chinese is a great series.
  
  Good luck and have fun!
  

A book like this one shows the stroke order for characters. I don't have a good resource for radicals - I learned pretty much everything I know about radicals while I was studying Japanese - but I wouldn't consider that to be a very high priority until you're high-intermediate-ish.

> The characters themselves lend no help when it comes to pronunciation

Lots of characters have radicals called phonetics that hint at pronunciation. This is especially true of simplified characters. Have you tried something like this?. Learning the characters straight from the textbook was awful for me but this book has helped endlessly

I would use this or this to start learning your first couple thousand characters while supplementing that with a coursebook for beginners (like Assimil or Teach Yourself) and graded readers.

Learn the radicals and how the characters are put together, don't just try to memorize each character as a set of random squiggles.