What Gster was saying is use the help files that come with Maya first, check them out and have a bit of a practice.
They are located in the main menu bar>Help. At the top, on the far right hand side.
There's a lot of info that will answer topics like the question you asked, plus tutorials to give you a bit of a start.
Then if there's something that you don't understand, or you can't find there, post a question on the forum, checking that out first will save yourself and others a lot of time.Questions like the one you asked aren't stupid ones so don't feel bad, it's just you have all the basic information there in the program.
Don't feel dumb, everyone has to begin somewhere!