It's good to start with a kit. It'll teach you stuff you're not going to learn from an ARF. And it's stuff that can bite you.

What happens when we build from a kit is that when we crash the suckers, we can look over what happened and learn. If we built it right but the wing failed in flight, we know the design was weak. And we can look at the pieces and tell where it was weak. Or if we look at the pieces and notice bad glue joints, we got a clue why.

With an ARF, you don't have the background you have if you started with kits. But what the heck........

With ARFs, you're going to learn almost the same things (if you pay attention to the crash damage), you're just going to learn them slower and at more cost and won't have the experience to make the ARF better as you assemble it. You also won't have the experience to choose an ARF at the LHS when you can look closely at it in the box. But what the heck....... You'll learn. It'll just be in a different order. No big deal.

Just remember, the ARF doesn't change into RtF (ready to fly) immediately after you've stuck it together and hung all the parts on like it looks on the box. If you're a newbie, it's still ALMOST ready to fly until you get an experienced flyer to check it over... thoroughly.