That's an absolutely baseless claim. Nothing prevents you from learning both in the same time. You are saying "you're not learning programming but learning to copy-paste from internet and copy-pasted examples are in PHP - ergo, PHP sucks as a language". That's baloney - PHP is perfectly suited to be used as beginner's language to learn programming - the only precondition being you have to learn programming. Otherwise, of course, PHP couldn't help you - it's not some magic dust that can make you know programming just because you copy-pasted some PHP code. Blaming the language for that is just wrong.