Characters

I've been doing well with my daily repetitions on the Chinese characters I already know. However, I've been quite lazy with adding new material. I'm embarrassed to admit that so far I only know 110 characters. I've had enough time, but not the motivation to cram more info into my brain. I should be doing about 10 characters a day, but I've been doing about 10 a week. If I actually do 10 a day in 2 months I'll know an additional 600 characters for a total of 710. Well short of the 4000 I need to learn. At 10 characters a day it'll take me about 14 months to learn 4000. I have a feeling I won't reach near native fluency in 2 years.

It takes me quite a while to learn 10 characters. Basically, I learn the pronunciation and the stroke order for each character. Then I write the characters down 10 or so times each until I get the hang of it. I put the characters into Mnemosyne and go do something else. A couple hours later I go back to Mnemosyne to see how well I remember what I learned. On the question side I put the definition of the character. Once I see the definition I write out the character and pronounce the word out loud. If I get it correct I mark it as a two and Mnemosyne reschedules it for repetition. If I don't get it correct I mark it as a one or zero and redo it until I get it correct. This process takes quite a while. I've found that if I just try to memorize what the character looks like without learning to write it, it doesn't stick in my memory very well.

I could go the lazy route and just learn speaking and not reading and writing, but whats the fun in that?