For someone just starting to try forex trading, what trends or patterns would be most useful or fundamental to learn about and study first?
You should read as much as possible. I can recommend to pay attention to these: head and shoulders, triangles, engulfing pattern, ichimoku, cloud bounce the bottom line. For start I can recommend this broker https://www.avatrade.co.za/ it has powerful education platform, and mobile and web based trading with MetaTrader 4 and AvaTradeGO. These platforms are very popular nowadays.