I agree all the three opinions above, everyone's right about the process of learning Chinese.  More, my suggestion is mentioned as follow:1) Knowing the way to ask questions in Chinese would certainly benefit your language learning.  In other words, the process of picking up Chinese writing or pinyin would be accelerated if you can speak Chinese first.  2) If your goal for learning Chinese is about academic needs, just like what Willow and Aaron said, you'd better to learn both Chinese speaking and writing simotaneously; because Chinese is quite complicated languge system in terms of the characters; sometimes, one word contains various meanings and four ways to pronounce.  Honestly, as a Taiwanese, I think Chinese sometimes is too hard to learn for Foreigners.  However, there're more and more foreigners speak Chinese as nature as thier mother tongues!  And, I believe you can make it because you've knownhow to use pinyin pretty well!

at first u should learn pinyin well and learn some easy characterat the same time