If you know how to program you could probably already make sense of a lot of C, and for the rest you could try asking an AI to explain it to you.
> I'm out of my depth when it comes to loading something up in a debugger or whatever (is ghidra a debugger or what's the difference?)
When you hear "debugger", think "breakpoints". It's any tool that lets you do things like set breakpoints and step through code execution. In the C world, that would be tools like GDB and Valgrind. For Java - the IDEs themselves ship with debuggers (Eclipse, Intellij, etc), or jdb. In the frontend world your browser devtools ships with this functionality.
Debuggers can also typically let you view lower level details of a given binary's execution - like machine code for C, bytecode for Java, etc. They won't however decompile binaries or bytecode into the original higher level language.
Ghidra does come bundled with a debugger, but it can also do lots of other stuff (including decompilation).
> I don't know if that makes me teachable or beyond help, but I'd be an eager student.
If you're actually interested in this stuff, it would probably help to get some baseline familiarity with systems programming. Look up the 15-213 course material and exercises and work through it with the help of video lectures and a tutor - sentience agnostic.
I'm familiar with 'strings' and I've been playing with 'binwalk' to take apart files, but I'm out of my depth when it comes to loading something up in a debugger or whatever (is ghidra a debugger or what's the difference?) and looking at code. I don't speak C, and everything seems to look like C when it's shown in the examples of these things. How do I know if I'm looking at a sensible decompilation with actual runnable code or just gibberish because I'm trying to interpret a jpeg as an executable?
I don't know if that makes me teachable or beyond help, but I'd be an eager student.