I finally sat and played some more of this tonight , just a half dozen casual matches and lost most of them (I'm battling a helluva a head cold right now and took a substantial amount of cold meds before hand
) but I've noticed some things that really shouldn't work - I should never be able to jump in MK into crouching MK and have it work more then once in a row and yet the 1 win I did muster up tonight ? I did that about 10 times against a NASH and it kept working. That said I was making many mistakes of my own that cost me all those other matches, hitting buttons when I'm trying to block , doing a crouching hard kick when it's unsafe , forgetting to block correctly, etc. I'm not the greatest player but the important thing is knowing where you went wrong and working on continual improvement.
I still feel as though new players should really learn the game just a bit to avoid future frustration. There's not a lot to teach you in the game if you don't know how to properly record stuff to play back but I highly recommend watching those free cross counter vids and follow up with the character training vids the official youtube street fighter channel has been throwing up.
ON that note - you may have heard many times to start with Ryu - he's simply the easiest character to learn and he's also pretty good but I think Rashid is also a good starting point , lot's of options and he's a bit faster with a simpler to understand Vtrigger. Either way fundamental spacing / footsies will get you further then throwing projectiles.