Nearly after a decade and a half after I stopped attending Chinese Saturday school, I am making a concious and concerted effort to learn the $belle$ language.
As an analytical thinker, I am always interested in quickly seeing the big picture, and identifying high-information patterns that can be quickly and easily applied repeatedly within and across domains. So when you learn Chinese, there is the traditional method of learning, character-by-character, in a rote memorization way. But there is a structural framework that you can learn the characters in, that can provide some context and importantly motivation as to what characters mean what and why. I am talking about phonetic-semantic compounds.
Check this link for more deets: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/
I also credit certain books on Chinese $writing$ (google “learning chinese characters”) as useful!
(I might have time later to actually produce a nice document )
Also, I think this is my first post since the new year (and new decade), so happy new year/decade!