First of all,let’s set a goal for your study.Be able to have a conversation with native Chinese people ,read Chinese newspapers and understand a talk show within one year is our goal.
If you are very lazy and don’t have a motivation to study Chinese,maybe you can do some investment to motivate yourself.Buy online courses or more books.The idea is that we will only pursue our goals if we have invested some resources on them.
An Indian student told us that he has a regular time for learning Chinese with entertainment.He watches Chinese television at least four hours per week, sometimes movies and upload the lessons of language course and some Chinese music with lyrics,he download many albums of famous Chinese singers like Jolin Tsai,Jay Chou and Jacky Cheung.He also likes to talk with local people in Chinese:his neighbors,workmates and anybody he meets at supermarkets,restaurants and banks even though his Chinese was poor.Sometimes,people tried to switch to English but he still insisted on speaking Chinese with them.So this is very important,never by shy to talk with people in their language.This is a useful tip suits for learning any language.
There is a well-known concept among the people who study memory that our brain recalls information by generating connections.If "sugar" then "sweet". If "fire" then "smoke".
This means we will slow down our learning Chinese process when we try to memorize Chinese characters one by one. We can learn much faster by get understanding of short sentences that provide a specific context for the characters.This is the exact way kids learn a language and the meaning of Chinese characters changes according to the context:: changing the order of the addends you’ll get a different result.By now it should be obvious to you that studying the Chinese characters one by one isn't very effective. But there are still many people that choose to do so.
Use a free software "Anki" to learn and revise Chinese characters through flashcards with a clever scheduling "SRS" is alsoa good method to memorize Chinese characters.
In order to exploit the context rule,you can downloaded a deck of flashcards "Mastering Chinese Characters" which is composed of 14,000 sentences.Smart.fm, the company that released it and claims that the deck contains the 98% of characters used in newspapers,you can download it for free once you installed Anki.This deck mostly contains sentences so you can learn these 3,000 characters easily in the right context.This should allow you to learn the words used in the newspapers. Attention again, a Chinese word is often composed of two or three characters.