That’s perfectly normal! You won’t be able to handwrite characters unless you practice doing just that. Of course, mnemonics and such can help to remember certain characters, but just reading will not enable you to write by hand. I suggest you check out apps like Skritter that focus specifically on handwriting characters (I am affiliated, but recommended Skritter long before I started working with them).

Yes indeed, reading aloud.. especially if the characters have the BPMF along side the idieogram to verify you are on track.

Guessing tones really can be daunting.

A. lexical recognition deals with learning both characters and the common names of things. So I scan the newspapers for names and events, and I read the English language news in Taiwan to know what are the front page topics.

B. gramatical presentation is big frustration as 2nd language material is just too generic, newspapers are a specialized stye. So this is where I look to elementary and middle school textbooks for short reading material of good style.

C. idioms and creativity are hard. Where do you find the Chinese lexicon for Harry Potter? This is where I look at the Chinese titles for all the western movies in Taiwan and translate the titles — there are some surprising and amusing contrasts that offer up a lot of interesting questions for my Taiwanese friends to explain.

Other….
Whenever out and about, I try to re-read the neighborhood signage for characters that I’ve ignored or misunderstood.

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Tools of the trade, it really helps to have an Android or Ipad with Pleco dictionary to input what you see.. in actual brushstrokes. I’ve been doing so for about 10 years (with a Palm Zire72).

Oh, neat, I’m definitely going to try to get hold of the first book. Synonym dictionaries are also good, of course, but I do think it’s possible to get by with digital sources I already have (including the MoE online dictionary, of course). I also keep spreadsheets like that and at some point, I might try to organise it into something which might be meaningful for someone else, but something tells me it will just take too much time.