Making a model is too much for a beginner. Because you have to create model, create skin, wrap it (which is annoying), attach the model to bone, then animating the bone (which is very very tedious thing to do). Making is a art of combining anyways so I suggest you to do geomerging first. -Grendel himself started with this tutorial and he became a great modeller (not to mention almost all his starting models were just geomerge!). It is all about patience and creativity.
By the way, milkshape is great for beginners because everything is clear (you can just practice making something like a Tank or Truck by combining some squares, cylinder and basic geometry). But making complicated thing such as human body is just too hard in milkshape.