I recommend learning from YouTube! I posted some great links here: What do I have to do to start practicing digital art? - #8 by YRH This thread also has a lot of other useful comments from other users. I recommend Hide channel in particular to learn how to draw a body in various poses. He has lesson videos as well as a ton of live streams.
In general, I’m a bit wary of giving out advice as what works for one person might not be good for another one. For beginners like me and you it’s best to just keep drawing! So draw what you enjoy and copy from artists and artwork that you like. If you prefer chibi/cute characters, try to find references like that and draw from them (avoid tracing as much as possible though!).
As for side by side copy, yes, it’s normal it will not look good the first time. It won’t look good even the 20’th time 
But you will improve gradually and you will see that when you look back to your pictures from a few weeks or months ago.
I also wanted to share these insights observing professional anime artists:
- A professional animator with years of experience may still make some small mistakes when drawing a character. In other words, making mistakes is normal and expected. It’s important that you can spot them and know how to fix! But that will come naturally with experience.
- You can have an illustration with wobbly and sloppy lines and it will still look amazing when colored. As long as the general shapes are well balanced, color choice is good, etc. it will hold up. This means the overall impression and composition is always more important than any fine details.