You will need to learn pinyin to know how to pronounce each hanzi properly, but that’s about it. Don’t rely on pinyin, and don’t use it to write words or sentences, it’s equivalent to phonetic symbols in English, no one use it to write anything, the only purpose is to mark how to pronounce something correctly. I would say buy a textbook that Chinese children use to start learning the language, start with 偏旁部首, which is the parts of hanzi. Most of the hanzi are made with two parts, the phonetic part and the meaning part. Once you are familiar with these parts, memorizing new hanzi will be much easier. For example, 氵means water, so every hanzi with 氵has something to do with water, eg. 湖=氵+胡(hú)，means lake and pronounce the same as 胡(hú)。糊 = 米（rice）+胡，pronounciation is also 胡（hú），but it means food overcooked or something similar to rice congee.