I consider myself a beginner as well. I started flying last year with a Tower trainer with a .46 on it. I have around 10 flights on it, but found myself too scared to try different things with it. I just really, really didn't want to crash it. I picked up one of Tower's 40" electric foamies. I started with the P-51 mustang and found it to be a great little plane. Due to the low cost and the ease of repair with foam, I quickly got much more comfortable doing rolls, loops, hammer heads, and starting to experiment with inverted flying. I really had a blast with the little mustang. Then I picked up one of the Tower Corsairs. This plane flew so much different than the mustang. Compared to the mustang, it was much more aerobatic and seemed to require much more responsive thumbs. It wasn't long before I had 10 2200 batteries and was logging 5 to10 flights a day last summer after work. I've found my flying skills and confidence have both grown quite a bit from the foamies.
I quickly got the itch for a bigger warbird and built my first ARF (VQ Mig 3). I was able to get one successful maiden in on it before the season ended and fell in love with tail draggers and warbirds. I also discovered that I really need to work on my landings and gain experience taxiing and taking off with a tail dragger so I picked up a Flyzone beaver. My thought here was that this was the best of both worlds as it is a tail dragger and has flaps to work with. So far this winter, I've logged around 60 flights on it without issue. Constantly doing touch and goes and experimenting with flaps.
My point here is that by getting into an electric foamie, I feel like I have really begun to polish my flying skills without fear that I'm going to smash up my more expensive balsa plane because of a stupid mistake. I know I will, at some point, smash plenty of planes as I progress in this hobby, but if I saved even just one by being more comfortable and polishing my flying skills, it's worth it to me.
Although, after just finishing building my second kit this winter, I would be capable of repairing one, it isn't nearly as much of a concern with a foam plane.
I'm not, by any means, saying that the way I went about this was the right was to do it. I'm just telling the OP what seemed to really make the difference for me and helped boost my flying skills and my confidence.