Just because you lost everything while trading does not make it gambling. You are right, you shouldn't have jumped into trading from the very beginning without knowing anything about the market. But this does not mean that you will not trade at all unless you have learned everything. You should actually try investing small amount of money into trading and learn from the mistakes you will be making. In fact you will be getting experience while learning.
Trading with small amounts and losing them will just act like that you are paying tuition on learning from school and its more worthy than to pay up someone to join up some trading courses. Learning would always vary on experience rather than making yourself going full time on reading up on fundamentals rather than on actual. Losing is inevitable but we can really reduce such thing on how we gonna execute trades basing on our experience that we had faced.
starting with less capital is very good we will lose it but we can get valuable experience , it is like paying fees for market it will teaches us many things