Is Integrated Chinese a good complement to FSI for characters?

[Rrina]

I've been taking the FSI course and I absolutely love it, can't tire of saying how wonderful it's been. But now I want to learn the characters too, not just pinyin. Should I spend the money for Integrated Chinese, or any other similar program? or is it enough to use some of the available character learning tools online?

Thanks!

[shibole]

I'm not familiar with FSI, but if you already know words and grammar, you might just want to download Anki (the SRS one, not the palmos one), look up characters in a dictionary, and use that for study. Then use eStroke (do a search) for looking up stroke order and print out some practice grids to practice writing.

I'm going through Integrated Chinese right now and I think it's good, but I'm not sure it's needed just for learning characters. Then again the textbook is reasonably priced and you might find the exercises in the workbook useful.

After using the Character Workbook a bit I don't really like it. I won't be buying the character workbook for L1 pt 2 or L2.