I think you mean do Chinese learn Pinyin before characters. Pinyin in Chinese is "pronounciation" and is based on English alphabets. Chinese writings are characters based, which are complicated to write and type. Unlike English, you cannot read a Chinese word and figure out how to say it. The mainland Chinese have derived a good method to solve this problem by adopting pinyin and simplied characters. Now one can encode a chinese word by Pinyin and through this you can write (tpye) and speak Chinese by Pinyin. If you want to discuss further, please send me an email. Good luck.

学习中文拼音不是必需的，但是它可以更快速的使学习者掌握中文，类似于英文中的音标。

我们上小学的时候会学一点拼音。但是我们不是为了学习它如何发音，而是为了学习如何写汉字。因为小孩子只会说，却不会写。

When we start to learn Chinese,we should learn pinyin first.If youwork hard,youwill be good at it.

Pinin is the basic part of learning Chinese, same as alphabets of English.