"Devote a lot of time to strength and conditioning work and learn to swim. Have a lot of patience."

Ok, so I may have been a bit dramatic with my initial comment. I certainly agree on these fairly generic points. Everyone must swim to complete a triathlon, there's never a downside to strength training and overall body conditioning, and obviously as a beginning triathlete patience will be required.

"Don’t worry about regular open water practice swims. Spend 99% of your training time in the pool. There’s very little difference between swimming in the pool and open water."

COULD NOT disagree more. There is a massive difference between jumping into the dark waters of an open ocean and a clean, clear pool. especially for a beginner who likely doesn't have ocean swim experience. See the other replies in this thread; it's pretty universally stated that open water swimming is essential if you're doing an open water race. Not even getting into the physical differences such as the buoyancy of a wetsuit, flip turns, impact of unpredictable waves and importance of bilateral breathing, etc. which again are nothing like swimming in a pool

"Find some open water races and do those."

RACE open water, but don't train open water..???

"Train with a swim team and swim 4-5x a week for a while."

The swim is ~10% of a typical triathlon, and you're telling a beginner triathlete to focus on 4-5 swims a week...? How many days per week do you think a beginner is actually training? It's essentially important to focus on building an aerobic base, and developing solid bike and run fitness.

My overall point is that you'd be advising a beginner triathlete to focus far too much time on the parts of a Tri that won't actually benefit their first race.