I've never been a good advice giver, and it also doesn't help that English isn't my native language.
Well, animation is all about keyframes, you need to figure out what key positions does the animated figure take and make enough of them for animation to be detailed enough, well that's some basic stuff. I sometimes try to pose myself to find a needed pose.
Also, in mdlvis you can't pose different bodyparts separately in one frame, but you can easily copy specific bone positions by slightly rotating them in the next frame.
I hope that's somewhat helpful.