Chinese Characters, Pin Yin, and Tones . . . Which one?

Characters and Pronunciation 

       As discussed in the, "A Tonal Language" post, Chinese words are greatly based upon the pitch, and sound of a word in order to define the meaning of words. The question we will be looking at, is which do you start which? Do you start learning characters, pin yin, or tones? First we will discuss some background on pin yin. 

       Zhou You Guang (周有光), inventor of Chinese pin yin. He was a man who noticed the difficulty for foreigners to pronounce Chinese words, and created a system to solve this problem. Pin yin, is the utilization of the western alphabet to give Chinese characters an easier understanding of its pronunciation. For example, a student (who doesn't speak Chinese) is learning a new word. The word the student is learning is 马 (Horse). To a person that doesn't understand or speak Chinese, this is a picture. To give the character a pronunciation we use pin yin. The pin yin, or letters, for this word is: Mǎ .

The pin yin provides a speaker with important information that allows for the correct pronunciation of the character. The first piece of information we are given, is the letters for the character. This provides the speaker with the pronunciation of the character. Then, we are given a tone (the accent mark above the vowel). Finally, with this information a speaker can fully pronounce and enunciate the character correctly.

In the images below, we see the Chinese version of the western alphabet or a pin yin chart, rather. Notice some key differences: there is no "v" and the letters are not pronounced the same way they are in the English alphabet.

Chinese Pin Yin.https://www.purpleculture.net/pinyin-cards-223-cards-p-26731/. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.

After learning more about Chinese pin yin, we can again look at the question: "Which do you learn first?". As a Chinese language learner I recommend learning pin yin first. I recommend a student only learns pinyin until he or she is capable of quick, efficient pronunciation of Chinese words. This allows the student to learn words and characters more efficiently because they don't have to focus on pronunciation anymore, rather they can focus on how to use news words, and make sentences. (To clarify: pin yin and tones go hand in hand. You can't learn one without the other).
It can be argued that learning pin yin first is not as efficient as learning characters first. If a student learns what characters mean, they can look at a character and understand its meaning right away. This is an efficient way of reading the Chinese language. On the other hand, this is not an efficient way of speaking and reading the language. Learning the characters first prevents the student from actually speaking Chinese, and focuses more on reading; therefore making pin yin the "better" first option.
Click HERE to learn more about pinyin!