When first starting, is there a standard order of topics that you should learn before others?

I've been browsing the sidebar for a while and have noted some apps and resources, and I've read the guide over in /r/languagelearning, but I am still not 100% sure where to begin to get the bare-bone basics for simplified mandarin.

This link in the sidebar's starter guide, as well as several of the starter posts, have mentioned that learning pinyin should be the first thing to learn, but after this, the advice seems to vary. The link above is saying that you should learn stroke order and then the "kangxi radical list" to better understand how characters are broken down, but I've also come across posts saying that it's not entirely beneficial and is generally just used for indexing; i.e., it doesn't help you memorize vocabulary any better or understand why characters are written the way they are or even how to write them.

However, I've read an article or two about breaking characters down into phonetic and semantic parts or something to achieve the above results, and I was wondering if there's a greater extent of things to learn about before jumping into some basic vocabulary that I'm not aware of yet. Basically, I don't know the extent of content that exists that I should look up and wanted some input on where to begin. I think grammar is quite interesting, but once again, I feel like there's limitations on what I can study and understand because I lack the vocabulary to understand the entire sentence yet - so while basic syntax rules might make sense, applying them well is harder if you can't read the examples.

So, would it make sense to learn pinyin/tones/proper pronunciation first, followed by like HSK1 vocab, and then dive into some grammar and basic sentence structures afterwards? Should you try and supplement these with auditory media and work towards that at the same time or focus on one aspect at a time? What important things am I excluding here?

Sorry if I asked a lot, I'm just trying to put together some guidelines. I would just take a university class, but my school doesn't offer it so I am trying it out by myself for now.

Thanks

submitted by /u/Yogg_Sothoth_Arbys
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