If you just want to learn the characters, then these books provide a good system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Remembering_the_Hanz

If you just want to learn the characters, then these books provide a good system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Remembering_the_Hanzi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Re... I’m 1000 characters in after 4 months of 1 hour a day study, but some people report quicker progress, so YMMV. You’ll still need to learn a bunch of words though, since most words in Mandarin are two characters long. Written Chinese is still called Mandarin. There’s Literary Chinese, which is different, but you don’t want to learn that. There’s no standard way to write other Chinese languages, like Cantonese, in characters. People still do but there’s no standard for it.