[tehwalrus]

But each spoken syllable (even separated by tone) can have 5 or 6 meanings depending on context (which are different characters)! You can't get passed a few basic phrases without hitting this.

By learning the characters (especially if you learn the radicals inside each character first) you can build up an understanding of the context of each character that you're using.

For example, how would you go about learning the response to the question "Which zhong?"

zhong guo de zhong / 中国的中

("the 'middle' character from 'middle kingdom' (China)")

and knowing to give the correct response when someone is confused about what you're saying in a sentence (which can happen a lot when you're a beginner who makes word order mistakes.)

I used to use Memrise for this ( http://memrise.com ) but since they updated the UI you can no longer clearly see which dependent radicals a character has easily, so I've accidentally stopped practising.