yes, but you will lose much of the fun of it, and obviously you will not be able to read anything when in China or Taiwan! Moreover, you will find only very poor books (with some exceptions) that could help your learning.

of course, you can. and you need a chinese dictionary. but only pingying, you will find it boring and unuseful. Unuseful, i mean, i learned pingying when i was grade1 in primary school. Teacher taught us Pingying so that we can pronance correctly, and when we come accross some difficulty in reading(don't know what the character means and what is the character pronanciation),then we can look up dictionary by means of pingying, then find it, and you can learn it. of course the textbook was writen down one line with pingying and one line with characters . But few weeks later, teacher didn't support us to read with pingyin, just we didn't know how pronance it then we had a look. In other work, pingyin is just a tool to help you how to pronance and how to use it to memory Chinese. If you want to learn Chinese well, pingyin is a neccessary meothd but you are not expected to learn chinese well.

Of course not, Chinese is language of Characters, not letter. Different words maybe share same pinyin. For example, 杀 and 沙 are both "sha3" in pinyin, 杀 means "kill" while 沙 means "sand".

That depends. It would be impractical to live in China with only the acknowledge of Pinyin becuase chinese characters are much often used, and not all people in china speaks standard Mandarin. Even Chinese cannot understand each other when both sides are speaking in their own accents. But if being able to read Chinese (with Pinyin) is what you want, you can. :)

of course you can do that , but chinese isn't easy to learn . you should try your best . i think you can make it !