[livingparadox]

TypeScript is, strictly, a superset of javascript. You probably could "jump directly to TypeScript" but you would not be able to "skip learning JavaScript" as TypeScript is based off the concepts in JS.

That being said, I don't see why you couldn't learn them concurrently; you can learn the basics of TypeScript and then simply rewrite any relevant JS example code into TypeScript to learn JS code in a TS context.

Edit: I should also point out that integrating with any JS libraries may require you to install the '@types/' package alongside it to maintain type-safety. For example, if you're using jQuery, you can install the '@types/jquery' package which will expose all the type information for the jquery package.

[mercer]

The downside of going straight for TS is that it's a bit more work to figure out how to build and debug (with sourcemaps) if you're not too familiar with front-end development.

On the other hand the upside, and a very big one, is that if you set up the relatively simple TS build process, you automatically get all the ES2015+ stuff for free, even without needing to figure out Webpack and Babel and the like (with some caveats front-end-wise, primarily Promises and Fetch).