Greetings, this is an expression of my toribash experience which I think would have helped me in the beginning of my own toribash journey. And which I think might be useful to you.

This will not solve all the possible troubles you might find yourself in, but it might give you a direction. Also, this will be focused only on how to play the game and not how to achieve victory. Specifically and hopefully, learning how to convert your lifetime knowledge of moving your body to the game.

So, let me go through problems that we meet while learning the game. Some of those are less important that the others, but they still matter.

• Playing high turn frames mods first. Even worse would be playing with small reaction time. Why? As a new player, one does not know deep enough how to move at all, and in that condition is forced to perform complex actions under no time. Imagine trying to run when you do not know how to crawl. All that while being timed. Turn frames are directly opposite to control.
• Not knowing what are you doing AND what your tori is capable of doing. Clicking the joints randomly is detrimental both to learning and to playing. Also related to this is making a change each single turn.
• The most important issue, which slows down progress the most: trusting ghost. Not because it actually lies sometimes, but because, in most cases, more than a half of what it shows is useless. As an example, consider xspar.tbm. Default ghost shows you the next 100 frames, whereas you spend 10 per turn. Catching by eye the exact position your tori would be in is difficult. And what do you even need those 90 remaining frames for? Even worse, those remaining frames make players discard valid moves because they look like one would fall onto the floor face first in no time, whereas one can stop the movement next turn.

For the first two issues the solutions are simple:

• Learn from basics to more complex movements, ideally with small turn frames set AND without a timer at first. Why? Consider real life, we, while this is a stretch, move with 1 turn frame each single moment of life. A mistake that our equivalent of ghost(physical senses) shows us is corrected almost instantly. But playing with more turn frames demands not making mistakes in the first place.
• Learning the basics of joints and setting intentions. Sounds obvious, but at times if you ask yourself what joints are absolutely essential for a move and what joints are only supplementary you might find out that you do unnecessary things. Without intentions, you would be unable to know what joints are needed for the movement since you do not know what the movement even is. Even "I want to jump around without falling" is better than nothing, the more defined it is the better it would be.

But ghost is a tricky problem, which you should spend the most amount of time on. Learn to read what you need from it and ignore the rest, because otherwise it will try its hardest to dissuade you from correct moves. The easiest way to see it in action is to find a live mma match and watch how their ghosts try to fall nearly each turn.

You may find useful this script for personally experiencing how ghost warps our play.