The one thing that traditionally casts fear into the hearts of foreigner learns of Chinese is, not surprisingly, the writing system with its thousands of complex-seeming characters (well, that, and the tones :-)).  The conventional wisdom for students of Cantonese is to concentrate on gaining fluency in the spoken language and to worry about becoming literate later, much later, preferably when you have mastered spoken Cantonese and have moved on to learning Mandarin.  For this reason, I resisted beginning to learn Chinese characters, until now, that is.