> A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch! 'Pretty much every

> A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch! 'Pretty much every night' is the most important part. Learning Chinese characters is a grind and you just need to keep chipping away at it. Pick a nice sustainable number of characters (maybe 6, maybe 3, maybe 10 but something that takes maybe 30 minutes to an hour to do including revision) and then do it every day without fail. Number of days in a row spent learning is far more important than number of new words learnt per day, so always try to optimise for the former rather than the latter. At some point, almost every Chinese learner who has spent more than 3 years learning the language has looked back and thought 'why oh why didn't I just learn 3 characters a day'.