I have been self-studying Pinyin for a while, but I find that it is difficult for me to remember enough words and put them into sentences. Another teacher I spoke to recently suggested to combine Pinyin learning with characters. Would you agree with that? It’s just the idea of learning characters simultaneously with conversational Pinyin seems a bit daunting to me. The short answer is that it makes sense to focus on the spoken language first, thus delaying learning characters. It takes people much longer to be able to read Chinese, even for native speakers, we start to learn characters at grade 1 (5 or 6 years old). Language is for communication, even though we recognize characters, we can’t communicate without listening and speaking skills.