Oh no, you should learn your characters at the same time you learn to speak. It's fuckin' hard, but it will hurt your progress pretty severely if you rely on pinyin - you'll hit a point where your spoken Chinese severely outpaces your ability to read and write, so you'll have to either backtrack and relearn the same words or just end up more or less illiterate, like me.
I went with a delayed approach and it seems to be working alright. Probably waited too long to learn 汉字 though. I got the idea from that hacking Chinese website.
Oh no, you should learn your characters at the same time you learn to speak. It's fuckin' hard, but it will hurt your progress pretty severely if you rely on pinyin - you'll hit a point where your spoken Chinese severely outpaces your ability to read and write, so you'll have to either backtrack and relearn the same words or just end up more or less illiterate, like me.
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I went with a delayed approach and it seems to be working alright. Probably waited too long to learn 汉字 though. I got the idea from that hacking Chinese website.