I haven't really started learning writing yet, so I was thinking if I should start with the radicals first?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach?

Actually I'm not even sure what radicals are... :) I mean they seem to have a meaning too, but somebody told me that they really don't have a meaning (or just a minority of them do) and they only have "names" (like people). So is it useless to learn the "names" and tones of the radicals? Should I just learn to write them and how will it help me when I learn the real characters?

A reply from another almost-newbie! You can think about radicals as components into which characters can be decomposed. There's a very simple overview of the radicals here:

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php

However, the article on Wikipedia helps sow confusion where once you might have hoped for clarity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)

I started by getting some words under my belt, and am now going back to learn the radicals. McNaughton in his book on learning to read and write Chinese introduces radicals stage by stage, whilst also introducing characters built upon these radicals, which is a nice way of doing things.

For myself, starting from scratch just by learning the radicals would have been frustrating: I also want words that I can use. But some 600 characters in, I have gone back to brush up on the radicals, and this has been giving a greater sense of the structure of Chinese characters and helping the learning process.

I hope this helps.

Oops. That second link doesn't work, as the forums didn't parse the closing parenthesis as a part of the URL. Try this instead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_radicals

Yep, the wikipedia article is extremely confusing...

Is there any sense learning the "pronunciations" of radicals... I mean do they carry a meaning when they are used in different characters?
Or are they just good writing practice?

The pronunciations we have on the radical list are alternatively very useful (because they'll be used phonetically in lots of characters) or very obsolete: no one will use that pinyin to describe them, saying 反文旁 instead of zhǐ for 夂, for example (according to my sources--I don't actually know those names).

So something's got to be done for the radical lists; we'll want to teach 反文旁, but it's not immediately obvious how to put that into the prompt (especially since a lot of those names will give away the writing of the radical). Our lists' specification of variants is weird, too.

I'm not sure. I'll think of something at some point. You can Ignore the tones on the radicals whose pronunciations you don't want to learn, if you like.

I would start with "integrated chinese 1", don't learn radicals just yet.
I wouldn't bother learning the skritter pronunciation for the radicals, just learn the definition and shape. Pronunciation would probably help, but not a lot.

Oh, also: the radicals are arranged by my rough estimate of usefulness, so you can study the first few sections while beginning, and save most of them for later.

I agree with Zach, you should start with Integrated Chinese, rather than start with the radicals, otherwise you'll get bored.
Radicals are very useful to know because they give you a logical way to remember characters (you remember 云+力 for 动 for example, instead of remembering the strokes one by one).

You need them, but they're boring to learn. I guess you could go for a series of radicals after two or three IC lessons.

The first two volumes of the New Practical Chinese Reader (NPCR) are explicit in teaching a lot of the names that Chinese people use for the radicals, and I've found this moderately helpful when discussing characters with my Chinese instructors. A good reference I've found on the net is from the Centre for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language at Oxford:
http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Radical_index.htm Nick, having a list like that in skritter would definitely be cool.

But far more useful to me than learning radicals per se has been http://zhongwen.com/, which I use as my chief character memorization reference - it breaks characters into components and gives mnemonics for learning characters based on traditional sources (note that it is not and doesn't claim to give accurate character etymologies). I've bought a paper copy since I like to have it on hand at all times, and because that web site experiences frequent difficulties, more so when I was living in China.

I also use the MDBG dictionary http://usa.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php when zhongwen.com is lacking a word, and also to quickly copy and paste character components and traditional characters into flash cards (I learn traditional characters but only have simplified character input set-up on my laptop).

I will say that zhongwen.com is a bit tough to use as a beginner, because you have to sort out what is useful and what's not - it can be pretty overwhelming to have characters broken down so much, and it is based on traditional characters, and has Taiwanese as well as Mainland pronunciations.

I have the paper copy of Zhongwen.com, and although it's a terrifyingly impressive body of work, the text is so tiny that it's a bit of a pain to use. But the site is excellent, and I think will become more useful as time goes on.

Personally, I find radicals helpful, but I wouldn't try to learn them all before learning characters; at the very least, learn the characters that *are* radicals (or don't have any) first (like 月，木） and then some common characters that have variant radical forms (水，火). Really , they're not very useful until you encounter characters that use them; in both my Chinese and Japanese classes, we were introduced to the concept of radicals, but didn't learn any of them until we learned characters that use them (for example, it's difficult to discuss 楽しい, fun, as compared to　薬, medicine, unless you know about the "grass crown".)

Ultimately, it's more useful to you to learn the radicals with meaning (which can help you figure out a new character) rather than the ones that are just pronunciation (which you'll eventually start to notice and pick up on anyway.)

If you get a child's learn-to-write-chinese book, it will have all the really useful radicals that are also words in it.
EG ISBN 7532464989 (~100 characters, at least 75% radicals, plus 300 compound words, with pinyin, suit age 10+)
or ISBN753246492X (~60 characters, all radicals I think, with pinyin, with join-the-dots for writing practice, suit age 6+)
Then come back to Skritter in a few weeks.
By the way, I find it much easier to learn to write a character if I already know its sound and meaning, so I stronly recommend that you learn to speak a lot more than you try to write.

You need to recognise all the radicals (but not actually know them) if ever you want to look up a chinese character in a dictionary when you don't already know its pronunciation.