Past 2 days, plus the entirety of the first beta, PLUS about a week and a half of USF4 in between (excluding the 2 weeks straight I spent in training).
I haven't won a single match this beta. The amount I won in the first one is probably not even double digits. I have less than 5 rounds won this time around. My friend, who I convinced to preorder, hasn't touched a fighting game before I insisted he get into the beta. And he could kick my ass in SF4 with way less practice.
God damnit.
I'm redownloading this fucking beta.
I tell people this shit all the time, but it seems like at the beginner level nobody believes me: don't worry about wins and losses, worry about having fun. If you can't have fun doing anything unless you win, then don't get Street Fighter or any fighting game (or competitive game, period), don't ever play any sports, don't ever race somebody irl, etc.
If you learn enough that you can have fun --whatever that entails outside of pure W/L-- you'll enjoy practicing and get better and better, and soon enough the people who kicked your ass won't be competitive enough for you to have much fun playing (seriously) against. At that point you climb the ladder and enter the next tier of ass whuppings. And then, provided you maintain the correct attitude, you continue to learn and improve with higher level stuff.
You should set goals for yourself, and I'll emphasize again that your goal should not be to beat player X or win Y games in a row. Your goal should be something like: practice a combo until you've got it down in training mode, and then to land it in a match against a real opponent. Eventually your combos will become second nature. If you can't make your character do exactly what you want, then you need more practice time, period. But nobody's perfect, so even the best players in the world put in ridiculous hours in practice mode.
Also, SF4 doesn't translate to SFV. To be honest, the games I recommended my beginner friend are Last Blade 2, Garou and SF3: 3S. Those games teach you hit confirms and the value of 2 and 3 step combos. SF4 was just full of fuckery that will probably never be in another mainline SF again.