Nodejs or php(yii2) for newbie?

Question

PHP

Good evening.
I study programming by practice, there is no money for teachers. I decided to create something like fl.ru, a portal with high performance and an interesting interface. The portal is more of a test one, it's interesting to play with highload, optimize your own code and add load.
Studied CSS3, MySQL, I'm learning JS, in parallel I'm building a website.
Interested in BEM technology, because faced meager knowledge of English terms to call classes names. Yandex actively promotes this method + recommends writing the server part in Node.js when using BEM.
Is it worth investing your time in deep learning of Node.JS and creating a portal of this level on Node.js, or is it still worth separating the backend from the frontend and writing backend in yii2, and frontend in JS + Node.JS + BEM.
Because I have not achieved anything in any of the programming languages ​​yet, hence I am looking for a solution.
I read a lot of articles on Habré, but even the comments were more interested, although I didn’t make a decision from the greedy holivars.
PS: I plan to conduct tests on 2 servers (old, 2 Xeon 4-core and 8GB RAM). The estimated load is 10-30 thousand visitors and approximately 3-4 thousand / sec of average queries to the database. I understand that you can write such nonsense in any language, but still, I wonder what you advise? Where to grow, so to speak, otherwise they will soon be kicked out of the couch to look for work. (WP&Joomla is not mine, but the layout is very boring).

Answer 1

Neither, you just need php, naked php )) And only then think about frameworks

Answer 2

Kind.
"I study programming by practice, there is no money for teachers." - Why do we need to know? O_O Internet is, why teachers? even in school you can not go and learn everything yourself if you want.
"The portal is more of a test one, I'm not a suicide, to sell my parents' apartment, to promote it :)" - well, yes .. all those who achieved something sold their apartment, etc.
"Studied CSS3, MySQL" - some strange couple O_O
"I haven't achieved anything in any of the programming languages ​​yet" - then maybe it's better to start small and gradually rise? Of course, you can immediately take a swing at a large portal, keep yourself busy, learn a lot of new things.
"Where to grow, so to speak, otherwise they will soon be kicked out of the couch to look for a job. (WP & Joomla - not mine, but the layout is very boring)." - play with one, play with the other, and then choose what you like.
And if you want to know about $$, then look for vacancies, look, compare

Answer 3

Guys, thanks for the replies. In general, the issue has already been resolved. I decided to write it first in php (pure) in order to fully explore all the features, then eventually write it in node.js, comparing the performance and the pain of writing. Everyone is looking for something different. Thank you.