Note that there's a large difference between learning characters and learning to read.

Simple examples: 可口可樂, 手機, 大哥大

If you just knew the characters, you would understand those as: 1) Can Mouth Can Happy 2) Hand Machine 3) Big Older Brother Big

Those are actually: 1) Coca-Cola 2) Cell phone 3) Cell phone (slang)

And those are just for simple nouns. There's also grammar patterns and characters like 把 that can modify sentence structure, to name a couple more examples.