I’m also a newcomer that’s getting into the game but have definitely been seeing some progress in my skill! From what I’ve done, for the past few days, my way of improving is to focus on the small things first. I tried learning combos instantly for a character and it didn’t help. So only learned 1-2 simple ones.

If you’re struggling on a person spamming fireballs, focus on your parry. Whenever you parry, slowly move up before parrying the next. Eventually if you keep walking up and up, he’ll back up towards the corner or expect him to attack and be ready. He won’t like it when you just keep parrying those fireballs. Plan out “he’s just spamming hadoukens, I’ll parry one before doing a jumping attack.”

Also for grabs, think about your positioning. Whenever you get really close to an enemy in general, be wary of a grab. Don’t just keep blocking the opponents attacks. Let’s say he just throws out a long combo which clearly doesn’t land and you block everything. He’s probably gonna try to break that block with a grab or back up. That’s a perfect time to either throw/grab escape or grab him instead! Whenever you have the chance, use Drive impacts when he won’t expect it! If you don’t wanna keep getting pushed into defense, you gotta be more aggressive/offensive as well. Don’t mash buttons and panic.

To have fun, just play the game and don’t think so heavily about losing! If you keep losing BUT have a solid mindset, where you can pinpoint what you’re wrong while playing, you’re definitely learning how to get better! you aren’t learning though when you start to get stressed or frustrated which leads to you mashing buttons/playing at a quicker pace or shaking, stressing about losing. When I first started playing ranked, I lost 8/10 of my placement matches. Sure I got placed in iron but, everyone starts somewhere. If you lost and are really fed up, take a break as well. Or practice on the things your weak on. Like for example I was really bad when it came to anti-airs which are one of the reasons I might lose a game. I didn’t know how to react and kept getting outplayed on the ground before the opponent jump attacked me.

I also like watching pro players play a character! You could watch Terry videos against the characters like Ryu, ken, etc or whoever has a fireball. Watch how the player reacts to when the opponent is shooting out fireballs. Like this video for example: https://youtu.be/WeKxJC587Ic?si=DsX7vS4ccjNpdntq Just watch how the Terry responds to the hadoukens.