What's the best way to get at Lua from where I am?

If you really want to learn, I would explore and try to learn with experience.

There is a lot you can read at the Roblox Developer Hub and there are definitely a lot of resources out there that can help you get started with the basics of programming such as learning what variables are, functions, loops, etc.

The difficult part of programming is not how to write scripts in Lua, but how to solve problems in general. If you learn any programming language, you should be able to learn most other languages fairly quickly, it's just a matter of learning new syntax.

A great way to learn how to do stuff is to reverse engineer. Although a lot of free models are pretty messy and difficult to read, you would be able to find a few things out there where you could read inside and try to figure out how it works by reading the script.

There are a lot of great articles to get you started on the developer hub I mentioned earlier, such as this article that shows you how to make traps and pickup boosts.

If I were you, I would think of a small project and use a lot of google to find out how to complete it. By complete it, I really mean understand what you are writing, and how it works. For example, trying to make a dance floor that randomly changes colours every second.

There are a lot of ways to learn, and everyone learns differently. However, with good googling skills you can get very far no matter where you are starting from.

Hope this helps :)