My name is Gary Burt and I am teaching myself Access. I am building a database of my recipes. I am learning a lot about Access and getting to respect it a lot.
Welcome to the forum. You are going about teaching yourself to most appropriate way, by actually working on a project. Set your goals and make yourself reach those goals is the way you learn.
The very first and most important part of creating any database is to get the structure (schema) correct. You may want to do some reading about "normalization" and be sure that you have your database normalized before you start to add any functionality or user interface.
I know databases, having worked on Oracle, Sybase, and DBase to name three. Access has so much more, especially the graphical user interface. So far, I find it has a lack of documentation that I am used to.