Actually it’s up to how do you learn! Follow me, I will let you learn in a easy way! About the characters, my suggestions is to learn speaking and listening first. Once you have feeling about the pronunciation, writing will be much easier to master. Or, maybe, you don’t even to learn! What’s Pin yin? Why don’t you check Miss. Pinyin’s tips? The answer is there! as well as “lines” you mentioned.

actually there are over 50000 characters but it’s around 3000 characters you need to read regular media like newspapers japanese also has like 50000 ( almost all of them identical to the hanzi ) but in japanese you only need 2000 for everyday reading and writing