I disagree. This is how you learn things deeply. It may take more effort and focus initially, and feel harder - though that's a bit of the point -- you remember things better during stressful situations, and the additional information allows your mind to connect more different pieces together, and in different parts of your brain (visual and langage). It might take a year of review before it starts to really click, and understanding the process of learning and so setting your expectations accordingly is how you can be more successful, faster.

So obviously I am only speaking through assumption here, but isn't the Chinese character set almost entirely orthogonal to the language? That is, very little is lost by learning it through Pidgin? The extra year it might take to fully memorize the Chinese characters would seem to have only a glancing effect on how much conversational Chinese you could speak

Largely true in my experience, but without hanzi you're illiterate in China. Definitely a plausible thing for a short visit, but if you stay for a longer period I think it'd be very paralyzing. This comes from an experience I had traveling with a friend when I was a beginning fluent reader and speaker and he just a speaker. Over the few months in Beijing his confidence deteriorated and he ended up staying at home ordering the same food from the nearby market every day. I think his illiteracy contributed to that.

This is very true. I studied abroad last year, and some of the students who could not read had an incredibly difficult time. Eventually, they were forced to catch up, and life got much better for them. They could explore the city much easier, do things on there own, without having to have someone who could read with them.

Could you elaborate. How was not being able to read a problem?

Did they have trouble navigating the city? Was this perhaps in a city without subways?

As an example, lets imagine we're in Taipei and we're ill.

We're walking down the street, but all the shops look the same. http://goo.gl/maps/sj3ft

Where can I get some medicine?

The answer is the one that says ”藥行“

I thought we were talking about people who spoke Chinese? Can't they just ask?

On a few occasions, in my own country, I've had old immigrants ask me to read something for them. I don't know if they are visually impaired or illiterate but it wasn't a big deal. (Though it is sad when you consider these people have probably been living here for a long time.)

Anyway, if it's someone who doesn't speak English it's not _that_ difficult to find medicine.

Go on the Internet, google a picture of the medicine you need, and show it to people?

Or use Google Translate? I've communicated with realtors using Google Translate. It was a frustrating experience, but it worked.

And if that doesn't work then I'm sure you can find _someone_ who speaks English. That wouldn't take half an hour, I'm sure. You can also try using gestures or drawings.

This strikes me as fairly trivial stuff. I mean, I'll grant you that I'd be worried sick if my mother was running around in Taipei on her own, as she's not used to traveling and doesn't speak English. But we seem to be talking about young, smart, educated English speakers here. It's not that big a deal.

Edit: said->sad

I don't get it.

If you're a foreign guy in China there are always tons of girls who'll go with you to wherever you want to go and who'll translate for you. If you speak just a little Chinese you can have a very comfortable life there.

Sure, it's not impossible to get around. You're just always going to be dependent on said girls. Even with the foreigners-don't-need-to-know-Chinese excuse, being illiterate is difficult.

Sure. I guess we're just disagreeing on how much of a problem it is and after how much time this will get to you. I suppose it's a subjective thing.

Agreed, my experience was stated above: I spent 4 months there and some a persons confidence deteriorate. Being slightly literate myself was frustrating but extremely manageable.

For some people, the freedom to go to a restaurant and understand the menu is considered valuable.

Many, if not most, restaurants in China have picture menus.

Update: that's in the major cities anyway.

But each spoken syllable (even separated by tone) can have 5 or 6 meanings depending on context (which are different characters)! You can't get passed a few basic phrases without hitting this.

By learning the characters (especially if you learn the radicals inside each character first) you can build up an understanding of the context of each character that you're using.

For example, how would you go about learning the response to the question "Which zhong?"

zhong guo de zhong / 中国的中

("the 'middle' character from 'middle kingdom' (China)")

and knowing to give the correct response when someone is confused about what you're saying in a sentence (which can happen a lot when you're a beginner who makes word order mistakes.)

I used to use Memrise for this ( http://memrise.com ) but since they updated the UI you can no longer clearly see which dependent radicals a character has easily, so I've accidentally stopped practising.