5 Pieces of Advice for Anyone Just Starting to Learn Chinese

Here are a couple points I have recently written for a friend of mine who has just started her adventure with Chinese. She has asked for some pointers to be cognizant of during her study, and I thought I would publish them for other aspiring Chinese speakers.

1. Write using pinyin or bopomofo, not characters. Some who start Chinese get so enthralled by Chinese characters (漢字) that they begrudge spending a lot of time on tones. I would argue that while one can pick up characters at a later stage, negligence or half-heartedness when studying tones in the beginning results in stalled progress in the future. If possible, forgo studying characters for the entire first semester (or a couple of weeks, if you study outside of school) until you use them flawlessly. You will thank me later.
2. Color-code characters. After you actually start learning characters, the first challenge is memorizing their tones without resorting to ultimately detrimental additional annotation techniques, like writing the tone mark above the character. The best method for associating characters with tones is to tie one another with a color. A lot of Chinese study applications, like Pleco, already allow that. For instance, if you associate red with the first tone and mark the relevant character in red anytime you study or review it, your brain will automatically register this character as having a specific color. Pleco uses red to denote the first tone, so I have always imagined 商 in my head as having a red color.
3. Learn the tone rule that almost never makes it to textbooks. You will soon learn that even though there are 4 tones, there are certain situations in which tones change depending on the preceding or proceeding tone. For example, if a word has two 3rd tones, the first of the pair is pronounced as 2nd tone. No worries, though! There are basically 3 rules here and you will learn them fast. There is, however, one tone rule that Chinese speakers use that is pretty much never mentioned in books: the rule that a 2nd tone preceded by a 1st or 2nd tone changes into 1st tone. For example, sān niánjí (三年級) becomes sān niānjí. This rule takes some time to get used to, but just being aware of it from the start goes a long way in understanding your Chinese friends.
4. Use spaced repetition. The best way to retain a big amount of characters is to use spaced repetition. Pleco and Anki are just two of the many software options that support it, so make sure to check out if your software does support it as well before you settle on it. You can then concentrate on the characters that need most review as opposed to reviewing everything all the time. Furthermore, you can technically start learning by spaced repetition at any stage of studying Chinese, but the later you start the more cumbersome it becomes, because you basically have to go through a lot of easy characters or manually exclude them before actually making this technique useful.
5. Memorize characters by components. Be cognizant that Chinese characters are compounds of smaller elements. Memorizing those individual componenets is easier than memorizing a complete character. For instance, the 喜 in 喜歡 (to like) looks pretty complicated. Rather than drawing it in your head from beginning to end, memorize it is actually 吉 on top of a 䒑 and a 口. This is a much more economical way of studying Chinese, much better than memorizing each character as a separate entity. A lot of those components are characters themselves, so in the process of memorizing a character you also inadvertently memorize other ones as well. Keep in mind that there is a finite number of those elements, so this can really pay off in the long term.

Looking back, if someone gave me these pieces of advice when I was just starting to study Chinese, I would have had much fewer problems in the intermediate and advanced stages later on.

Good luck!