Hi Leon, thanks for dropping by. Everyone’s brain works a little differently, and some people have a hard time memorizing characters. I always found it easy to remember pictures, like characters, but not so easy to remember sounds. I can’t tell you what will work for you, but I can tell me what worked for me.Whenever I find a characters that I have a hard time remembering, I make up some way to remember. For example, 买 and 卖 – buy and sell. I could never remember which was which, until I made something up: you can see that the bottom of each of these characters there’s a 头, which means “head”. If you’re going to the market with nothing on your head, 买, you’re going there to buy. If you’re going to the market with something balanced on your head, 卖, you’re going there to sell.And peng – 朋 – as in 朋友，friend. Friends are like two moons next to each other – that’s why this character is 月and 月together. 月 itself looks a little like a ladder to the MOON, if you ask me. 开 looks like one of those Japanese-style temple gates – gates that are OPEN.So yeah, it’s a little ridiculous, but those kind of things help me remember. Maybe it helps because I spend so much time devising a way to remember that the familiarity with the character helps it stick.Other than that, the truth is that there’s no way to just open your head and pour the bloody characters in, more’s the pity, and you do have to put the work in. I’m still not a perfectly fluent reader, I need a dictionary often, and I practice a lot and I live in China. But coming up with tricks like that for the harder characters helps me remember. Once you have used tricks to remember the basic characters, after a while you don’t need those tricks because you’ve learned the characters, and you can come up with tricks for harder ones. Good luck!