I don't consider myself a beginner at Chinese (having studied at uni for 1 year and living in China for 5 years) - but I meet many people who are just starting out on their Chinese learning adventure and they typically say "oh, I'm not going to study the characters right now, they're too difficult - maybe later".

I took this attitude and seriously regret it. I find that the characters now give me something to hold on to, something to help visualise the often alien sounding Chinese words (that are also often identical in pronunciation). I used to joke with Chinese friends who would not see the similarity between 睡觉 and 水饺 or 不行 and 步行, they just couldn't get how any one could get these mixed up (especially the 1st example that has different tones!). I now find my self doing the same thing, a friend who is a novice at Chinese will tell me that he thought 2 words were the same and I would have to think a bit before seeing the similarity because when he said the words, I thought of the character.

I seriously think that Skritter has removed the 'Characters are too hard' excuse for me and I would recommend even business people who just want basic 'survival Chinese' to learn the characters and not just those that are really focused on the language but just to get a handle on the subtle differences between bafflingly similar words. Isn't it true that the more different ways you learn something the more it sticks?

What do other people think? Is it easier to acquire the basics of Chinese with or without the characters? Which way did you do it? I also think the same way with tones, better to start with them in Skritter (with the Characters) than to try to fix them later, what's your view?

Quick question: does your university not require you to study characters!? I know people doing self-study that might not study characters, but I've never heard of a university getting by on just pinyin.

IMHO you might as well learn the characters as you go or you are going to be illiterate and won't understand many parts of actual Chinese speech (ie 什么华？中华的华).

@joshwhitson13: I studied in Nanjing Uni for 1 year (self paid, not part of a Uni program), I could already speak Chinese at that time and so did not start at the lowest level (I tried the first class and it was ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4!).

The level of character writing of my class mates was way above me and I tried my hardest to catch up but it was next to impossible, I crammed for tests and did well but after 1 year of being out of Uni I had forgotten 90% of the characters I'd learnt (while my spoken went from strength to strength - giving sales pitches and leading meetings in Chinese). Once I found Skritter I basically started from scratch again on the writing front.

I started this post to get an idea of what people think about character learning for those that have no plans to study full time or become fluent like my colleagues and customers who want to "get by" in Chinese but do not have the time or the inclination to study the language to fluency or literacy - their goals tend to be ordering food/drinks, getting around, instructing their ayi/driver etc.

I agree with you that learning characters from the start is the way to go. In fact, being able to read signs is a BIG part of "getting by" in China! These kinds of learners don't necessarily need to know how to write characters; I didn't learn writing at all for the first year of my studies and I got by fine without it (although you can only go so far before you really need the deeper understanding of characters that only writing practice can give you). But you need to start recognizing characters right from the beginning.
I also think tones are pretty important. It's not hard to at least learn what the different tones are supposed to sound like, though some people will have a harder time than others reproducing those sounds.

I don't think there is much adoption, but there are certain professors pushing to delay character introduction:

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp102_teach_chinese.html

My university started us with the Chinese Primer's "difficult but fast" pace, where character writing lagged behind listening, speaking, and reading. I think it's a better approach than the "easy but slow" approach, where you slow down in order to keep your writing in sync with the other approaches, but I also think that with Skritter, you can learn writing fast enough to have the "difficult but fast" pace without the character writing lagging behind.

@joshwhitson13: My university offered two streams of Chinese. There was the usual stream in which you would learn speaking, listening, reading and writing. Then there was the second stream which was one year of spoken chinese only (using pinyin). Starting in second year, there was a series of courses which was writing only. However, these writing-only classes were (de facto) only appropriate for American Born Chinese who could already speak fluently. My classmates from the speaking-only stream and I struggled a lot.

The one year of speaking-only classes was basically a dead-end and didn't serve students who wanted to continue well.

We did not study characters from the start, figuring that it was almost like learning two languages at once. After a couple of years we decided to bite the bullet and struggled to get our reading and writing up to our verbal skills. In the process there were many "aha" moments like your 睡觉 and 水饺 experience. Now we cannot imagine studying without characters; because of the huge number of homonyms, pinyin is quite cryptic.

I suppose there's a place for just verbal skills (our 9 year old does not read and write but is fluent) but maybe especially for a beginner whose pronunciation is unclear it's necessary. Many times early on we got into a taxi, told the driver where we wanted to go, receiving either a blank look or a flurry of (to us) unintelligible Chinese in response. So we would hand over the written location. Likewise in a restaurant, unable to read the menu, we asked for various dishes and sometimes received what we wanted, sometimes were surprised by what came from the kitchen.

I can understand the decision not to learn characters because it takes so much effort over such a long time... although readers of this forum don't have that excuse.

I'm smiling because readers of THIS forum? Have all decided to study the characters. Go on other learning Chinese sites and you will get a lot more diversity in opinions on character learning. Here, it's pretty much preaching to the choir.

:)

I studied characters from quite early on, but only a very little bit. This was mainly because I was learning with my children, and they were still learning to read English then, so I didn't want to confuse them with many Hanzi. If I were starting again, I would learn more writing earlier, but I would still not try to learn to write every character that I learned to say. I think that would unnecessarily restrict the amount of speaking and listening I would want to do.
I agree that the hanzi are important for helping to distinguish between homonyms. This is partly because of "hooks" in my brain, but mostly because of trying to use a dictionary. I guess if you have a well-structured course and a good teacher, you don't need to rely on dictionaries so much, and might be able to manage without hanzi for longer.
I've only recently reached the stage where I am learning to write words that I don't already recognise the sound of. For me, it doesn't work very well. I have particular trouble with the tones, as mostly I remember tones by knowing the sound of whole phrases.
Rachael.