If you haven't seriously used branches before, git can be a bit hard to wrap your head around. And trying to map it back to what you're familiar with in svn adds to the frustration.

The best thing to do is create some "play" git repositories and see what happens when you run any command. You can also run "git clone" on local directories to mimic actual remote repositories without having to set anything up. Don't worry about screwing anything up as you can just delete the directory and start over.