Whether you should learn Chinese characters or not depends on your objectives. 

If you are a beginner and want to be able to communicate in Chinese as soon as possible, it would be better if you focus on speaking without learning to read and write so that you can progress more rapidly.  You will learn Pinyin at the very beginning.  Pinyin is a special system used to describe the pronunciation and tones of Chinese characters using Latin letters.  It allows you to learn to speak Chinese while skipping the characters.

Reading characters is not difficult and is a lot of fun.  It will also help you to study Chinese more efficiently when you reach an intermediate level.  I suggest to my students learning to speak first. After taking lessons for a period of time, they can decide whether to learn the characters or not based on their own circumstances.  I don’t think learning to write characters is necessary and realistic for adult learners, as it takes a lot of time.  Moreover, if you can read characters, you will be able to “write” them with a keyboard using pinyin as an input method.