If you decide to do the above mentioned practice, start out in manual mode if it's available. When you are done just send everything to the trash bin.

The reason I say use manual mode is because I don't want you to get confused about how the camera is behaving vs what I am trying to convey.

After you get a sense of how it works, you can test out the various modes and see if they make any sense for you, or, if you just want to set everything manually.