The learning section is currently a work in progress and is bound to be incomplete 🚧

Tips for learning Chinese characters:

Let's begin with form: All Chinese characters are made to take up a rougly square space, historically they were also written in columns from top to bottom, right to left. All characters also have a specific stroke order that needs to be strictly followed, currently we only use the PRC stroke order with the exception of Chinese characters created in Japan or Korea. Here is the stroke order for the character 想:

Additionally, you might have noticed that strokes are dynamic, that is, they start slow and press hard, then transition to fast and light. That's because Chinese characters have traditionally been written on paper using a brush, allowing for more dynamic strokes than in other writing systems. Notice the change in speed here:

Animate

Generally you should apply the same principle when writing with a pen or pencil on paper. To get the hang of it, start practicing the initial strokes by starting slow and pressing hard, then finishing the stroke fast with light pressure. When learning characters, it's also recommended that you use a Ming/Song or a Regular Script font, due to them having clear indicators for stroke directions. On Youyin, we use the Regular Script.

Now to remembering characters: There are a couple of methods depending on the characters depending on their type.
Pictograms are characters like 木, 日, 山 and 月. These characters represent a specific physical object graphically.
A category similar to pictograms are the simple ideograms like 上(up), 下(down), 凸(convex), 凹(concave), which represent ideas graphically.
Then there are compound ideographs like 明(sun next to moon = bright), 休(man next to tree = relaxed), 好(woman next to child = good).
Finally there are phono-semantic compounds like 湖 and 河, both have the water radical 氵on their left side that determines their meaning, since the characters mean river and lake respectively. Their pronunciation is hú and hé respectively, which is determined by the main part of the character, that being 胡(hú) and 可(kě). Phono-semantic compounds basically use 1 or more radicals or characters that provide the meaning, and 1 character or radical that provides phonetic information, which the reader can use to guess what the character sounds like.