Learning to read Chinese fluently is a lifelong project for people who do not grow up in a Chinese-speaking environment. Learning to write Chinese fluently is even tougher.
You can only write a language if you can read it. So let’s start with reading. The primary obstacle to reading Chinese is learning to recognize, identify the meaning of, and pronounce each word you come across, including each character within the word. There are about 5,000 such characters [hanzi] used in everyday Chinese writing. Memorizing these is an enormous task. (Japanese, which uses around 2,000 Chinese characters [kanji] in addition to 71 phonetic kana characters, presents a similar obstacle.)
To get to an advanced level—but not fluency—you need to learn around 5,000 words and the 2,663 characters within those words. Those last two numbers come from the highest level of the HSK test, a standard for students learning Chinese as a second language.
**Memorizing characters is not