I think you are talking about Rotate order of the joints.
You can find "rotate Order" in attribute editor for each joint in your scene and there you can adjust the rotation order and other stuff.
But if you are new to maya, I think messing up with "joint order" and other animation techniques is not something that begginer should do.
If you still wanna start wth animation then I can't write any helpful sentance here in 2-3 lines. I suggest you to spend a lot studying maya's interface and the way maya works with all that stuff.
the choice is up to you!