Hanzi are something you can learn on your own time outside of class. It’s really not a good idea to skip them at all. As someone who’s also learning Chinese, hanzi make remembering what I learned easier, since you can see how lots of vocabulary that you learn consists of parts of other concepts synthesized together.
Plus you have loads of homophones, and thinking of which hanzi each word is using makes it far easier to know what you’re talking about.
Example: shí. It means 10. It also means time, as well as dozens of other things. I can’t imagine trying to mentally divide all the overlapping words without the visual assistance of different hanzi when reading. It’d be like trying to learn the differences between they’re/their/there in English as a second language without looking at the spelling differences. It makes it harder.
Plus you have loads of homophones, and thinking of which hanzi each word is using makes it far easier to know what you’re talking about.
Example: shí. It means 10. It also means time, as well as dozens of other things. I can’t imagine trying to mentally divide all the overlapping words without the visual assistance of different hanzi when reading. It’d be like trying to learn the differences between they’re/their/there in English as a second language without looking at the spelling differences. It makes it harder.