Ni shi nali ren?

Agreed. After my studies concluded I've hardly used it; having a setting where you're using it as part of your routine is by far the most reliable way to progress. (Unless you're a lot more disciplined than I am.)

For me personally, hanzi is likely to be quite valuable because of the amount of time I spend reading. But there are people who just learn the spoken language, to the point you can even find literacy classes for native Chinese speakers in a number of places around the world.

One of my friends in college and I decided we were going to learn Mandarin. His family all speak Cantonese and his logic was since he can read well, that's 80% of the battle. (My background is as far from Chinese as you can get without some form of deep core drilling equipment)

This lasted about 4 days before we both pretty much gave up at the same time. He would read the words in his head sounding them out as Cantonese and mentally "fleshing" them out as traditional Chinese characters. It was total confusion. As for me, I couldn't follow the audio and the characters at the same time. My eyes would go 3 characters ahead but the audio of the same phrase would suddenly end, 2 characters short. :P

Pretty much the limit of my takeaway from the effort was, "ni bun", and you need to hit all 4 modalities while learning a language: reading, writing, hearing, and speaking/composing. Playing a track over and over again isn't going to help you see someting that wasn't there for you before.