I agree the choice is somewhat overwhelming coming to PHP land as a newbie. Before I was using python django.
Which is a bit of a bugger because that's where I was thinking of starting, only because it seemed it would probably be well tested being used by drupal and all. Lavarell seemed like a Rails of PHP not that in itself is bad but I got the impression everything was implicit rather than explicit.
http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-frameworks-2014/ from this the other main newbie seems Phalcon, but it seems mysterious so wasn't wanting to start there.
So Yii seems to be a good option built from 5 in OOH style and doesn't have legacy PHP 4 code as Codeigniter does(could be wrong) so it should hopefully reduce errors in learning PHP as well.