I love languages myself, and have looked into Chinese (Mandarin). I am now thinking it would be good to learn Mandarin because of a growing threat of Chinese terrorist infiltration of other countries (similarly I would like to learn Arabic).
I have a friend at church who is from China, and he is NOT Chinese: he is Fushangrian, and his people are oppressed by the Chinese government (though of course they oppress all their people). The Chinese try to claim that there is only one Chinese language (Mandarin) that has a lot of dialects, when they are actually many languages separate from Mandarin that are suppressed. There is an illusion of a single language because the Asian character writing actually functions as a separate language itself, like the plains sign talk of the native Americans, and provides communication between people who would not be able to understand each other's spoken language. There was actually a man who developed a separate
writing system and tried to emphasize distinction of his native Hmong culture, who was assassinated by the government.
So yeah, a lot of interesting and scary stuff. My friend hates the Asian characters because he associates them with the Chinese, but I love them (they weren't invented by the Qin and weren't and aren't only used by them after all).
Some things about the character writing that will encourage you: the idea that there are 50000 unique pictures that have nothing to do with their definition and must be individually memorized is all false. There are no doubt many people who learn it that way, and they are of course greatly daunted by the task.
Firstly, there are only 214 radicals which are used in combination to make up all the 50000 total characters, and many of the radicals are rarely used, so you could say the radicals are the "alphabet" and the rest of the characters are words.
Also, these individual radicals can be traced to their original picture, and once you see it you can't easily unsee the connection. As I mentioned before, the characters are like sign language, and it helps you learn them if you think of them this way I think. The combinations are themselves mnemonic, for example the radicals for man and tree together mean "rest": a man leaning against a tree. Though radicals are also used when the character has (or used to have) a similar sound as the radical.
Here is an index of the radicals:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical
Clicking a radical in the index shows all the characters that radical appears in.
Here is a more compact list, and if you mouse over a radical it gives the meaning, and clicking it goes to a page that often shows the pictographic origin of the radical and its progression to its current shape, which is very helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radicals_in_Unicode
This list is at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on radicals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)
http://chineseclass101.com is probably a good source. The class101 language learning programs usually have a lot of material that can be downloaded during their free trial (they had good stuff for teaching radicals for the Asian characters part of learning Japanese), and their free membership has a lot of good stuff. They seem to have a lot of good videos on youtube you can watch without a membership at all. It's probably geared for adults though, I haven't specifically looked if they have anything for the younger side.
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