Learning to Read (Menu) Chinese

The one thing that traditionally casts fear into the hearts of foreigner learns of Chinese is, not surprisingly, the writing system with its thousands of complex-seeming characters (well, that, and the tones :-)).  The conventional wisdom for students of Cantonese is to concentrate on gaining fluency in the spoken language and to worry about becoming literate later, much later, preferably when you have mastered spoken Cantonese and have moved on to learning Mandarin.  For this reason, I resisted beginning to learn Chinese characters, until now, that is.In preparation for my trip to Hong Kong, I bought this great book by James D. McCawley,.  McCawley was a professor of Chinese language at the University of Chicago and wrote this book for lovers of Chinese food who are not necessarily students of the language.  His goal is to teach people to read a menu written entirely in Chinese, or at least understand enough to be able to have some confidence in what you are ordering.  He also decodes the way Chinese menus are traditionally organized.  Since I'm a serious "foodie" and want to be able to eat when I see/smell something that looks good and be able to have sense of what I am actually eating, I am giving this method a try.  Let us just say that I am highly motivated.So far, I have created about 75 flash cards to teach myself to recognize the most useful Chinese characters I am most likely to find on a menu.  Below is a random sample.As I seem to be able to learn the characters without extraordinary effort, I am going to add additional characters pertaining to different types of tea (another passion of mine) and additional food items.I discovered a great website that has various search functions for Chinese characters, moving from written Chinese or Pinyan to English, and back.  They even give Cantonese romanization of the characters in 2 different systems, with pronunciation!  On-line Chinese dictionary  When you print out one of the pages, this is what you get.I got out my trusty scissors, a glue stick and index cards and set to work creating 2-sided flash cards.I possess an almost photographic memory for images (which was invaluable in art history) and so, perhaps, it is not surprising that I am learning to recognize characters with surprising speed.  This is actually much easier for me than spoken Cantonese.  I have begun recognizing many of the radicals that are used in the "food" and "cooking" characters and even the variations used in various positions in composite characters.  The system actually makes a great deal of sense to me, which is a relief.   After my return from Hong Kong, I plan to begin learning how to write the 800 or so basic characters and then learn how to read and write actual sentences.  In Hong Kong, I am hoping to find some good books for foreigners teaching just this, where I have noticed there are a number of language schools dedicated to teaching foreigners Cantonese and Mandarin.  What is traditionally the great stumbling block for foreigners--learning how to read and write--may turn out to be easier for me than most.  Wouldn't that be sweet!