I can't recommend http://www.chesstactics.org enough. Tactics are crucial, both for offense and defense. Read this for understanding, not to skim, and do the exercises. Again, do the exercises.

While going through the above, or after you've finished, do tactics on chesstempo.com or another site. You will miss a lot of them in the beginning, but practice makes perfect. It's crucial to your game to be able to just see certain positions jump out at you, and timed exercises will help immensely.

For playing practice, find an online site and be willing to suffer through some losses as your ranking settles in. Maybe you have never won a game, but believe it or not you are not the worst player ever. As your rating is found, you can match up against others on your level. There are several big sites, and a ton of others. I use chess.com.

Another thing to try is "correspondence" chess, where you can play out a game over days, weeks or even months. Why? Because you can play many such games at once, you can play a bit when you have time, you can play people all over the world (no time zone issues), etc. But perhaps the biggest thing is that when you have 6 or 12 games going, you have to be able to look at a board and find the best move essentially from scratch. This ability to look at a board for what it actually is right now (instead of in the context of your plans from 5 moves ago), is a very good skill to have.

They are micro puzzles that increase in difficulty and isolate specific parts of the chess game, be it beginning, mid, or end game. Once you do a couple thousand of these, move on to a real board where every piece is in play.

Trust me, you'll get good fast, it just depends how much time you're willing to put in. Also, go to chess clubs. I go every Monday in my city and it's a huge help to get insight from veterans and pros.

Once you start even remotely understanding strategy and moves, you will get so addicted. Just need get over that beginners hump. I'm still shit by the way.

I've "known" how to "play" chess since I was young, so I couldn't see the forest for the trees. Learning strategy via a different vehicle helped me get past those roadblocks.

I haven't played a game of chess in probably 10 years but I know that if I came back to it, I could approach it from a much better informed viewpoint, since now I understand the high-level strategic elements that 7-year-old me didn't realize existed.

It looked promising at first, but I still get creamed. At least it looks like I might know what I'm doing for the first few moves.

Study endgames first, you learn how the pieces move.

Then study middlegame tactics to see how they work together.

Lastly you study openings to get to your preferred middlegame.

See my previous comment for my recommendations on learning chess.

Amazing beginner course. Read this book and Vol2 and you will be ahead of most tournament players on the fundamentals. USCF 2100+ at my strongest.