Characters give us westerners lots of problems, but by all means include characters in your curriculum if you can. Pinyin is valuable as a romanization system, as Vivian and others have said, and it is the official one, but few Chinese know Pinyin well. Maps and street signs have some Pinyin, but otherwise you will need characters. For example, it would not be practical to text friends in China using Pinyin.

Well, if you just want to learn conversation level, pinyin is alright, but website, books, newspapers,signs on the street, everything people read and see on the street and use in daily life are writen in characters.

"pinyin" is phonetic symbol for Chinese. It can represent sounds of Chinese words,even the word you don't know its meaning. You can buy a dictionary to learn how to speak different words.

拼音相当于英文的26个字母一样，其实中文挺简单的，不要把她想得太过于复杂了，朋友我的[email protected]

Use pinyin as a tool to help you get the sound and tones right but learn how to read and write characters are really important. Many things like menus, signs and other types of text surrounding you in your daily life will be useful for you with some basic hanzi knowledge.