I'm learning Chinese characters at the moment since I can speak a little bit of Chinese but can't really read or write it!
I know that there are 1000's of characters to learn so I decided to find the most common Chinese characters as I thought these would be a good starting point. The following blog post runs through the 5 most common characters and there is a 2nd blog post (there may be more later on) that covers the next 5. For anyone else who is just starting out with reading and writing in Mandarin, this might be a useful starting point for you as well.
常见
是 = to be
不 = Not