The main challenge with Chinese is that - unlike any Western language - you can not guess the characters you do not know. You either know it or you don't. Only the context might offer some clues.
Getting started with Chinese: Depends on your talent. For me (untalented) taken a "real" class was essential for a good start. Self-learning for languages does not work for me.
That's not completely true.
Chinese characters are composed of parts, some of which are referred to as radicals. If you know the part/block, you can sometimes guess its meaning or sound. Also, new Chinese words are made of existing characters, so you can often guess multi-character words by knowing the individual characters. For example, the word for computer is "electric brain". You might be able to guess that if you knew that 電means electric and 腦 means brain
I recommend the site called http://hackingchinese.com
He has a lot of good tips for how to learn Chinese as a foreign adult
While it is true that you can't guess the meaning of characters that you don't know without any context, you definitely can lean the mean of characters that you don't know with context. In the same way, while I might understand the Greek and Roman roots for words in English, if I see the work by itself without any context, I'm not going to be able to understand it. With context, I can usually puzzle it out.
However, it is a huge mistake to ignore the benefits of learning Chinese characters. It is the reverse that is most beneficial. In Chinese the 3600 most common characters cover some insane percentage of the common words in use (only 2200 for Japanese!). These characters form a powerful mnemonic for learning vocabulary. I can easily learn to read the characters for a word and the word faster than I can learn the word by itself. As you learn more characters, it only accelerates your progress.
2-3 thousand characters seems like a daunting task, but as I always point out in these threads, adult level proficiency in a language requires somewhere around 15,000 word families (1 family = a word, all its inflections/conjugations/etc, and all related compound words). People telling you that you can be "fluent" with 2000 words are selling you something (2000 word families is the level of a toddler -- and then people are disappointed that they can only speak like a toddler...).
The absolute best thing you can do for learning a language that has Chinese characters in its writing is to learn those characters. I recommend learning them at the same time as the vocabulary. And to get back to the original comment: even now if I hear an unfamiliar word, I will usually trace what I think the characters are on my hand. Often people will correct me and once I get the correct characters the meaning is almost always obvious.
Or you could be like me, idly sitting in a Malaysian restaurant, reading "馬來" and trying to figure what "Horses Arriving" has to to do with curry.
Every language has exceptions to "rules". In fact, there are few hard and fast rules for any language, since every language is a mix of another.
But, once you get comfortable with a language, you can appreciate the differences and make interesting guesses about the exceptions' origins. It can be fun.
I like http://www.hanzicraft.com/ because it breaks down the characters into parts you can click on to get their definitions or origins. Hacking chinese also has a cool resources section here [1], categorized, so you can browse through dictionaries, listening tools, practice tests, browser add-ons, etc. etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji
The ateji for Malaysia is 馬来, Horse, come, ma rai.
Nowadays loanwords are usually written alphabetically instead of ateji. フランス and マレーシア. The old way is still written for abbreviations; 仏 is the equivalent of writing "Fr" in English.
An interesting case is America (亜米利加）where the abbreviation is 米 (pronounced "bei") not 亜 (pronounced "a") because A is for Asia! (亜細亜).
As any one reading HN should know, naming things is hard...
So, Malay (ie, of Malaysia).
The first character of 馬來 is "horse" and the second is "come/arrive". So I was sitting there puzzling it out until I realised that if I pronounced it in Mandarin, it sounded a lot like "Malay" - which is in fact what it means.
trying to connect electric brain to computer is similar to trying to connect "breakfast" to the morning meal. it's interesting to know the compound words, but breakfast is always the meal in the morning and not always the meal after a fast.