Any learning advice for beginners?

I looked over your small section for people who are new to the sub and I hope I'm not breaking any rules or annoying too many people by making this beginner's post (I'm used to /r/learnjapanese which deals with a lot of low effort posts and don't want to do that here).

1) Is Lingodeer a good app to begin learning with? I know apps are usually frowned upon when compared with textbooks but I'm finding the audio recordings and playback feature a life saver when learning a new sound combined with its tone, which would be harder with a textbook.

2) Should I learn in terms of characters and/or pinyin? On the app, they let you choose what to see, and I have it set to both, usually, but I've tried turning it off when reviewing words I already know. Is it something you change as you get better, i.e. to the point where you just learn new words and characters by sound and tone without the pinyin guide, or is pinyin always gonna be there with a new word?

Idk if this will mean anything to any of you but with Japanese, Chinese characters are used in writing and you kind of HAVE to learn to read and recognise them to get anywhere after the beginner stages, but some people don't get to that point and hinder their learning by only using the phonetic Japanese 'alphabet' to write those words. Is it the same with pinyin, since (correct me if I'm wrong) pretty much all written Chinese is in characters, not pinyin/roman text? Or is it only a problem if you choose to learn pinyin-only?

3) Are there any good anki decks with audio that you would recommend? I'm used to using it on my phone but it's much more tweakable on PC and I feel like audio recordings of the words is necessary as a beginner so I don't fuck up the tones.

4) Does each character have the same rough pronunciation or can it change completely? I've heard of things like the 'ni' from 'nihao' changing tone when spoken since it's two 3-tones next to each other, but would it ever change to a different sound completely like 'han' or something?

5) Also how do you input Chinese on PC and mobile? Is there like a google IME for it? Do you just do pinyin input on the typical keyboard layout then convert to Chinese?

Thanks

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