Here, the instructor is manually generating a curve to bounce the ball. Why doesn't Blender provide a gravity feature to bounce the ball automatically, with optional inelasticity and viscosity? Then no tedious manual curve generation would be needed and the bounce would look very natural!
If Blender does provide such a feature, then why is it not taught here? Manual curve manipulation seems to me an advanced touchup feature.
I'm guessing that's more of a physics settings thing than animation itself, I've created bouncy balls animations using physics before, but that left me with little to none control over the movement itself (direction, each bounce etc.)
Grant has a video on that here that I think you might like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gYsxqNJyu8
I'm sorry, I have given up trying to learn Blender. After the first (beginner) lesson, which was great, the remaining lessons were difficult to follow (the speakers spoke too fast, pressed keys too quickly, and used unfamiliar terminology). My work with Blender to try to create an animated birthday card had to be abandoned after several weeks because too many questions were arising, with even the answers on the Web being difficult to understand. I just don't have the time to work on learning Blender as a full-time activity in my life.
Sorry to hear that! I switch between these classes and beginner tutorials to do simple projects and see my progress, it can get a bit discouraging though, I feel like an idiot most of the time even after months of learning.
Best wishes!!
There's no reason to feel like an idiot.
CGI and animation are topics that people spend their entire lives learning and perfecting. Trying to animate a birthday card might very well had thrown you into the deep end too early in the process. It takes time to learn this stuff.
But if you want to feel consistent progress, you must learn the fundamentals like the back of your hand. Everything else builds on them. This goes for animation, modeling, rendering, anything really.