Extending this farther, I'd say everything you read or listen to in a foreign language should be in some kind of context, the richer the better. Reading characters outside of their context in words is pretty useless, but reading words outside of sentences isn't that much better, and sentences can be pretty awful by themselves.

For example, in English: "Do you have any paper towels?" What does the sentence mean?

Context #1: At a supermarket, talking to a clerk. The sentence means, "Please direct me to the cleaning supplies."

Context #2: At a friend's house, after I spill soda on the floor. The sentence means, "Please give me some cleaning supplies."

Context #3: A friend asked me to help pack for a camping trip, and we're going over the list of what's packed. The sentence means, "I suggest packing cleaning supplies."

Context #4: A friend spilled spilled soda on someone else's rug, but is unconcerned. The sentence means, "You should clean that up."

Exercise: Come up with a context where the sentence has its literal meaning, "do you have any paper towels?"

Pragmatics (as above) are a pretty extreme example, but even fairly plain descriptive sentences can be indecipherable without context. E.g., in Japanese 「本を貸してくれた。」 you know that somebody lent someone else a book and that the speaker somehow benefited from this action, or perhaps feels grateful. It probably very clear in context, but you have to practice reading it with the context.

And this is why flash cards suck (not that they're useless...)

exactly. Actually, the Memrise thing would have been better if they had actually put it in context, ie.:

"My 孩子 is very naughty"

Agreed.

As a native Chinese speaker I'm not sure about how a foreigner feels when he's picking up these chinese chars, but I do feel much better to remember new english words after dividing them into their original form, prefixies and sufficies.Now I can guess for the meaning of an english word even if I have never met it before.

My point is, this method can also be applied to studying Chinese. Modern Chinese words are seldom built with a single char(as opposed to the ancient Chineses). A character in Chineses does have some meanings, but not too detailed. I do not have enough linguistic knowledge but it feels like we need "modifiers" plus these "meta meanings" together to build a word.

From the perspective of a programmer let me show you some examples:

子 -- Meta, means "sub", "child", "unit" 节点 -- Noun, means "node" 子节点 -- Child node 系统 -- Noun, means "system" (I believe this word comes from English because the pronounciation is similar to "system" :-D ) 子系统 -- Subsystem 弹 -- Meta, means "Ammo" or "something moving in high speed" 子弹 -- A small, single unit of ammo(just bullet, not bombs, a bomb is too big to be described by "子") 原 -- Meta, means "meta"( :-D ), or "original" 原子 -- A "meta unit" or "original unit" should be an atom shouldn't it?

Hope this will make you better understand how we construct words. :-)

And for grammar, I think the best way to learn grammar is to observe how native speakers speak. Every language have some fixed ways so it will be fast for one to adapt to it.

> extremely steep initial learning curve

Well, not really. Spoken Chinese its relatively easy to start with, because its grammar is much simpler than even English grammar and its phonetics is smaller. Writing using a pinyin IME is not too hard. Reading require a familiarity with characters building blocks. What is very hard is hand writing, reading handwritten script, special fixed forms like the chengyu.