The best method of improving your reading and writing skills is just read and write! 

1. Understand the meaning of each character

Discover something that interests you and try to find out words you know as many as you can,then look up some of the ones that you don't know.A dictionary should always be on your side when you’re learning Chinese.Once you meet a character looksnot familiar,look up.You'll notice that some show up a lot more often than others, so better make sure you look up the morecommon ones.Better try to understand the meaning of each character rather than the whole word.As you may know,there’s a huge difference between Chinese and other western languages.Every Chinese character has its own meaning, Chinese words are made up of these different Chinese characters, and the characters are put together to give meaning to the whole word . Whenyou study a new character, just think about it like this. This way, it will be much easier for you to understand the slight difference between two synonyms.Some people always say that when they learn something or do something,they just have no feelings about it.The feeling is pretty hard to describe and cultivate but as you learn more and more,you would find something about this language that you never feel before .

2. Read both slowly quickly

Another thing you need to pay attention to improve Chinese skills is to read slowly.It means you should understand everything in the book for your intensive reading. Do not just read only one book if you want to improve your reading skills fast,read a lot - as much as possible. If you don’t have plenty time, don’t worry, just do fast reading. There is no need to understand every single word and sentence, you just need to get the basic meaning. Doing this can  help you understand the words you already know and help you cement the knowledge in your mind.Repeating makes proficient.

3. Listen more

Do you listen to cpop?Get into cpop and start reading the lyrics to the songs you liked most,then you have incentive to learn the characters as well. Plus there are some people on Youtube who sub songs with the Chinese characters, pinyin, and English, which is pretty nice.Practice reading with the books written in Chinese too.Maybe you get bored at first,you can set a goal.For example,read one essay everyday and get knowing of every characters it used. It really helped a lot!