If you want TOPIK5 or higher (C1 equivalence), it's the faster way. Without learning Hanja, you have to memorize virtually all the similarly sounding words and their fine differences, but after learning Hanja, you will start to recognize the combination, hence logic starts to kick in in place of brute force memorizing. Fortunately, you don't have to memorize all the symbols unlike in Chinese or Japanese which is a big relief. Just understand the concept and get a grasp of some most commonly used ones, learning Korean will become so much easier all of a sudden. Strongly recommended.

Hanja is useful to learn Korean. But It's not necessary. Hanja is very difficult. I don't recommand it.