[godelski]

This has been my experience too. Like I said before, just learning characters doesn't let you read in of itself because there are compound words. But you have to think of characters as building blocks. Then you repeat the process with words and it is easier to form mnemonics because you already have the base structure. The idea is to start from the ground up and build a strong base before you move to building the house. This is opposed to the classical Western style that is building random walls first. The thing is that the latter will get you conversational faster, but the former leads to a better understanding but takes more time.