Why Beginners should skip learning to write Chinese Characters by hand

When I first started learning Mandarin I spent far too much time trying to work out what would be the best way to learn writing. In the end I decided to forget about writing for the moment and just use pinyin input on the computer and concentrate on learning to read.

Now it seems that this may have been the best way to go about it anyway. This post on Pinyin.info points to a paper by two Professors of Mandarin in the U.S. advocating the Pen-less approach.