Hey strawberry,

Firstly welcome! And it's not really a stupid question, Maya can be quite a handful and it's hard to know where to start. I'll give you a look at how I've tackled that question so far but as you can guess it's different for every person.

Personally I began by getting a couple of books (introducing Autodesk Maya 2012 by Dariush Derakhshani and Mastering Autodesk Maya 2012 by Todd Palamar and Eric Keller) giving a whole overview of Maya and worked my way through the different projects supplied to get a feel for what I wanted to specialize in.
Other people use youtube and whilst it's a bit hit and miss there are some good tutorials out there - it's just trying to find them.

After working my way through the books which gave me a wonderful grounding I decided I wanted to specialize in modeling (same as yourself) but with a swing towards characters and sets for animated movies.
So I went looking for online tutorials and found this site and must admit I absolutely loved what I saw. The models in the tutorials where all beautiful high quality and appealing and so I bought a lifetime membership and can honestly say that that has been fantastic for my development. You can go at your own pace - the forum is fantastic if you get stuck and the instructors know their stuff!

After about two years of following tutorials from Simply Maya I made a big decision and signed up for an online course with AnimSchool to do their 3D character program.
This is a 21 month course split into 7 x 3 month terms which you take with a tutor from a different studio around the world (during my time I had teachers from Dreamworks Disney and Blue Sky) and they mentor you (via online meet-ups) through modeling characters, rigging characters and modeling environments. It was tough, especially working with crazy time zones as I live on the other side of the world to America but it took my modeling to another level again and know I'm in the process of making a demo reel to start applying for jobs.

The biggest thing you can do is keep working at it. No matter what you do as long as you're learning something from the process you'll keep getting better and better.

Here's a couple of pics of what I used to model like when I first started (the first two) to now after five years of study and practice (the last two)...