Completely lost...

Hello, I am a linguistics major who has recently gotten pretty interested in the subfield of computational linguistics. The courses at school in this subject rely upon programming in Python, and though I've purchased a self-teaching book as well as searched through documentation, I'm finding myself a bit lost with regards to making Python do what my first assignment wants me to do. I am not sure if these sort of posts are allowed here, but if someone in the community would be willing to help clarify some things to me over aim or something, I would cry tears of joy.

My aim name is sairoplane or sarieses

Thank you!