So - ChatGPT is great for breaking down concepts like this and answering questions about the basics until you get the hang of it. I would recommend crafting some programs while asking it for help on anything you get stuck with, until you can craft the programs without involving it (and still you can paste the programs into it and ask for pointers / fixes that it can see). I’m currently learning Go with assistance from ChatGPT and it’s hugely useful.
One other angle you could come at it from – this might venture into unpopularopinion territory, but I would actually recommend learning C at a very early stage. It’ll be tedious to make nontrivial programs with it, so you may not want to stick with it for your real projects, but since everything is bytes and pointers it gives you a chance to get extremely solid with the fundamentals before you start mucking around with slices / hashes / etc. I would recommend to try to get this particular problem working using C, which will be more work, but then when you come back and learn the Python concepts I think they’ll make a lot of sense and you’ll feel capable with them. IDK if it’ll work that way for you, but that’s what I did and I feel like it was a good way to go.