Reddit reviews Reading & Writing Chinese: Traditional Character Edition, A Comprehensive Guide to the Chinese Writing System

But my memory isnt that great and learning the characters is difficult for me (I've tried believe me!). I thought I might start off from the basics (with textbooks and stuff) and work from there.

Should I go for a simplified or traditional Chinese textbook? (See example)

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Traditional-Comprehensive/dp/0804832064/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376045169&sr=8-1&keywords=writing+cantonese

Sorry if this is a dense e-mail, could really do with the advice - thank you so much for replying!

I found the same problem too trying to learn Canto from NZ. Most of the resources are in Mandarin and you have to accept the fact that no one guide will fulfill all your needs. The two books that I have found most helpful are these:

https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Traditional-Comprehensive/dp/0804832064
This is a pretty extensive list of traditional characters with stroke diagrams to help you learn to write. I've found it invaluable as a resource however the pronunciation is given in Mandarin.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Cantonese-Teach-Yourself-Language/dp/0071750606
This is the best spoken Cantonese guide I have found and will help you with grammar integrated with everyday conversation.

Of course pronunciation is something that you can't get with a book. Pleco is a really helpful dictionary style app that includes Canto and Mandarin audio files. You can search for words by English, jyutping or stroke (assuming you know how to write.)

Final thing I would recommend is Cantonese 101 podcasts https://www.cantoneseclass101.com
It's well worth signing up to this (there's a free trial period) as the lessons are comprehensive and go up to an advanced level. The tutors are Hong Kongers so you will pick up a bit of the culture - and of course plenty to do with business, money and shopping.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Although this isn't very "quick", typing in chinese using 倉頡 has helped me retain characters more easily. If you communicate with people more in (written) chinese, it helps as you'll learn to recognize more words by seeing them more often. I found 倉頡 fairly easy to pick up with sufficient practice, and http://input.foruto.com/cccls/cjzd.html will display colored diagrams when you're having issues decomposing a character.

As for writing, writing each char a few times and using flashcards is probably your best bet. Some characters have somewhat non-obvious stroke order (eg: 為) and are hard to write just by looking at them. I have a copy of http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Traditional-Comprehensive/dp/0804832064/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312426614&sr=1-1 (there's a simplified ver available as well), and it's fairly good if you want to learn to write as they build up starting from simplier characters to more complex ones.

Honestly there's not really a quick way to go about this. Like every other skill it takes time and perseverance.

A good teacher is going to be the best- someone who is qualified to teach CSL.

that said here is one of the books I used to use which taught "by radical" which was great way to learn two things at once: individual characters and the radical system:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0804832064/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=512ZVoNoV2L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL100_SR100%2C100_&refRID=E1HW5HQMSF0KJNN82GCY

Also, Anything by Far East is usually great quality: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Character-Dictionary-Traditional-Version/dp/9576125200

If you have any questions or requests for more suggestions let me know. I've learned about 5 different ways and from a few different teachers, my main teacher is a person with a Chinese degree from China...so I learned a lot about how to teach/learn mandarin from him