One of the challenges of getting into linguistics is that there is so much to learn about. One page has sound changes, another about sentence organization, and another about meaning that is almost immediately too abstract. The first thing to do is not to read all the pages at once, but to pick a small unit of language and simply observe it. What you notice about a single phone, sentence, or a pair of words will be more useful to you than a dozen more definitions. It is easier to do linguistics when it is about observing things, rather than learning terms.
I would suggest that you begin your practice by focusing on three kinds of observations: sounds, forms, and structure. Sounds can tell you what you’re actually hearing and how it’s changing. Forms can tell you how words are composed of other parts. Structure can tell you how words interact with each other in a sentence. For example, you could start with the pair of words “walk” and “walked.” Pronounce them, write them, and see what’s different. Then take the sentence “The child opened the door” and play with the words a bit: “The door opened,” “The child opened it,” “Opened the child the door” and see which ones sound right and which ones don’t and why. Doing that kind of practice will help you learn to pay attention to evidence. It will also help you avoid the pitfall of approaching language as a series of curious phenomena.
There’s a pitfall that I’ve seen crop up pretty quickly. Students will be tempted to give something a name before they have been able to describe it. You might want to say that a phone is “harder” or a sentence is “incorrect” without being able to explain precisely what is happening. Try to resist that temptation. Describe first and then name. Instead of writing “This word sounds strange,” write “The final sound disappears when spoken quickly,” or instead of writing “The sentence becomes unclear when the object moves to the front,” write “The sentence becomes unclear when the object moves to the front.” That distinction makes a big difference. Linguistics relies on description. When you force yourself to say what is changing, where it is changing, and what the result of the change is, then you are creating an analysis. Start with the description.
A short daily practice block works better than occasional long sessions. Attention to linguistic detail is honed through regular practice. In your practice session, spend the first five minutes simply paying attention to a pair of words, a sentence, or a recording, and trying to write down what you hear without worrying whether it is right or wrong. Spend the next five minutes comparing things and posing a single question, such as “Why is the [s] ending on this verb form and not that one?” or “Why does this word order sound smoother than that one?” Spend the last five minutes translating what you wrote into prose. Not fancy prose. Not technical prose. Just prose. Then, at the end of the week, go back and read what you wrote, and see if your descriptions improved.
When you are struggling, the solution is almost never to read more theory. Instead, try narrowing your focus. If you cannot handle a whole paragraph, try practicing with a single sentence. If a single sentence is still too difficult, try just looking at the verb and its surrounding words. If you are getting tangled up in pronunciation, slow down and compare just two phones in the same environment. Students often feel that if they are confused, then they are incapable. The reality is that they are almost always simply looking at too big of a sample. By comparing smaller sets, you will get cleaner results. You will also get more useful feedback when you ask narrower questions. “I don’t understand syntax” is too broad. “Why does this sentence sound unclear when I move this constituent to the front?” is something you can actually test.
Try to keep your practice grounded in real language rather than constructing complicated examples. Listen to recordings. Copy sentences from a book. Observe how plurals work in real writing. Compare two different ways of expressing the same thought. Linguistics will start to feel more real to you when you are engaging with language that you can hear, see, manipulate, copy and rewrite in your hands. Over time, the technical vocabulary will start to feel more friendly and less overwhelming because it will connect to patterns that you have already observed. That is a much more solid place to start than trying to get it all at once.