Problems with my character

To day so far there have been too many problems relating to my character and I feel, my perception of weight painting has changed, it has been non progressive because I struggle to identify problems and work out solutions relating to the functions of the character because I don't fully understand the tools to know how to solve any problems relating to certain tools when they malfunction.

I have mainly been having problems with connecting my joints and weight painting. I feel the main problem of all has been the weight painting because I struggle to know where to paint it because I don't physical understand where the weight influences on my character should be in order to bend certain parts of the body e.g. the legs and elbows. Personally my model is not bad over all but the movement and joints need serious work in order to look good moving, so far I think that most of my time has been wasted modelling, I personally want to move on but I feel that my understanding of Maya it's self is holding me back, I find it unreliable sometimes in relation to other packages like photoshop because if you make one small mistake everything collapses and I always have to face a problem that results me to making major errors with my characters which most likely they always need my character having to go back to the beginning to start again. This has been happening regularly and I feel this is what has been taking up a lot of my time.

Connecting controls to the skeleton and painting weights is something I need to work on for the future through watching more tutorials and learning the package properly to help solve these problems.