Chinese Characters for beginner 汉字

No-frills introduction to Chinese characters. As someone who could already speak some Chinese, I found it useful to structure my learning of written characters. Probably best to acquire some knowledge of Chinese grammar, pinyin, etc. before embarking on the course; my suggestion is Tsinghua University's introduction on edX.
Good points:
- The characters are presented in a logical order
Bad points:
- The video format is unfortunately not suited to this course. All the videos do is show the animated stroke order of the characters and teach you how to pronounce them. I'd have preferred it if the course was in the format of pages you can read.
- The insistence on the names of the various strokes is unnecessary. It's a neat thing to know but having them as the first topic is excessive.
- Some additional explanation would be useful at times. For example, a common pattern in Chinese characters is that they are formed by two parts, where one has something to do with the meaning, and the other one has something to do with the pronunciation. This becomes clear as the course goes on, but why not say so from the outset?