Rom Hacker-to-be

What schools of ROM hacking are you interested in? Just translation? If you're at all interested in the technical aspects you should give hacking Sonic 2 a try. It's fun working with an ASM source code that compiles into a perfect ROM.

First let me say that you can definitely do it. A year and a half ago when I began getting involved with the scene, and became a member of gbatemp (different username, btw, lol), I knew nothing about hacking of any sort. I bought the no$gba debugger and for a long time I did not know how to use it. But eventually I got the hang of it.

Right now I am at a stage sort of like you want to be.
I can do ROM hacking: extracting and modifying/reinserting data, and images
I have done save editing programs.
I have made many AR codes of various degrees of difficulty.
+ more stuff

I took me a long time to get to where I am and I could have actually gone about getting there in a better way.

At the start I was spreading myself to thin.

My suggestion is pick a specific aspect of hacking and learn how to do it.
Then once you are comfortable with that you can move on to something else.