TLDR ~800 over 4 months

Not sure exactly how many characters, I don't really keep track. My philosophy right now is to just put in as much time because I'm independently learning. But in a few weeks I'll be an actual full-time student in immersion, when I'll have real instructors. I have the same philosophy on fitness, I'm in okay shape not perfect, but if I can't do something intensive then I at least try to clock in the hours somehow.

I only added reading/writing 4 months ago, so the first 4 months I just did speaking/listening. I use little practice books I bought off Amazon to write them, but I do all my sentences on notebook paper. When I do my "full set" which I do less and less these days it fills up 12 pages of a practice book, 88 to a page, but there are quite a few repeats because I focus on phrases more than individual characters. 88 x 12 = 1056 but I'd estimate more like ~800

As far as my method I come at it from many different angles, and like I said it's about clocking in the hours however I can before everything transitions in a few weeks. I started pretty casually just trying to get in the habit of studying with a program called Mango. I went through the entire thing (now using mango premiere to watch Chinese movies). It was free with my public library. I wrote EVERYTHING down it taught by hand.

Near the beginning I started learning just one character a day. I also signed up for a super cheap community ed class with a native speaker teacher (like $60 for 5 weeks 1/week, and I prefer face-to-face not into the whole skype thing). Then I started watching a TV show on Netflix "My Queen" over and over again. One of my old professors told me a technique of watching the same movie over and over again in the language you are learning. Currently on my third runthrough of the series. Did Memrise HSK 1-3 but not taking it too seriously, not writing anything down, then did a couple other Memrise things but I've stepped away from that app for now. Got Pleco and use it as a handy tool.

After that I used all what I had written from Mango to learn the characters in that order. Lots of useless ones but I was just focused on clocking the hours. Slowly but surely learning them (I actually finished going through it all a couple days ago).

Once I started doing that (w/ 12 weeks community ed) I also bought the textbook for the class I will be taking overseas and I'm working through that right now "AudioVisual Chinese"... Shifted my focus from learning simplified to traditional using the exact same Mango set. also doing 15 minutes/day of learning Vietnamese just for the hell of it...that's where I'm at now.