Learning Chinese is supposed to be hard — but only because most people try to learn to write, speak and read all at once. Strip out writing and pronunciation and just learn to read, and the mountain shrinks. The first step on the read-only path is the 214 Kangxi radicals: the building blocks every character is composed of. Memorise the radicals and characters stop looking like noise.
See the 2006 blog post Read-only Chinese for the full pitch. The original (2004) Windows version of this tool used a Leitner-style spaced-repetition loop with a working set of ~30 radicals; this web version is plain flashcards for now.