I know the basics like cotton, lycra, chiffon, denim, taffeta but I read all the time on here about knits, wovens, Jersey amongst many others and I'm completely lost.
You seem to be muddling fibres with types of fabric.
Cotton is a fibre and can be woven or knitted into all sorts of different types of fabric from the finest lawn through to the heaviest canvas, or somewhere in between if it's knitted. Cotton is a natural fibre obtained from plants (it's the fibres from the boll which protects the seed heads. Linen too is a plant fibre, but comes from the bast fibres which support the stem of flax plants.
Other natural fibres are wool which grows on sheep and silk which is the fibres unravelled from the silk worm when it goes into the chrysalis stage of its life.
Acetate rayon and viscose rayon are man-made fibres, regenerated from wood pulp and other plant material.
Polyester, nylon (polyamide) and acrylic are synthetic fibres made from oil or coal.
Lycra (and Elastane) are brand names for spandex, which is a synthetic rubber fibre which added to other fibres make fabrics stretchy, the more elastane/Lycra the stretchier the fabric is. 2-5% for most woven fabrics just to make wearing and moving about easier, up to 20% or more for the very stretchy stuff used for sportswear.
Woven fabric has one set of threads running the length of the fabric and another set of threads going over and under those across the fabric.
There are two types of
knitted fabric; weft knitting which is essentially the same construction as hand knitting, though usually very much finer than you could knit with a pair of needles, and warp knitting which can only be made by machine and consists of multiple lines of chain stitches which are linked together.
Jersey is a weft knitted fabric, and can be made of wool, cotton, silk or synthetics.
Denim is a specific type of woven cotton with dark (usually blue) warp threads and softer (usually white) weft or filler threads. Used for jeans.
Chiffon is a very fine, floaty woven fabric (difficult to sew!) and can be made of silk or a synthetic fibre.
Maybe you could start a scrap book to collect as many different types of fabric as possible ( ask for as many samples as you can when ordering something else). Make a note of the fibre content as well as asking/researching the name of the fabric. If you use a particular fabric make a note of how it sewed and how it wears.
It takes time to learn all the different names, not helped by the fact that different
people retailers use different names for the same fabric and/or the same names for different fabrics! I thought I knew most of them but when I came back to sewing 3 or 4 years ago after a longish break I found there were some fabrics I'd never heard of. Ponte being one of them!