Oanda, is a Bucket Shop. Why on earth would anyone with over 4,000 posts refer a Newbie to Oanda. That makes no sense whatsoever.
New Trader:
You can learn to trade on the Barclays Direct FX platform. Barclays is an Institutional source in FX. There is a difference between Barclays Stockbrokers and Barclays Capital. I trade a portion of my cost basis with Barclays Capital on the BARX FX platform. You will need in the neighborhood of $300k to trade on that platform at my last check. However, you can trade Retail FX on the BARX Direct FX platform. I don't know the initial account requirements, but it won't be anywhere near the BARX FX institutional platform.
Here you will learn to trade on a platform with real interbank liquidity, rates, order processing, etc. Barclays is not a Retail Bucket Shop like Oanda and many of the other FCMs/Forex Brokers/Dealers/etc.
To remain in the Retail FX market and to avoid trading with a Bucket Shop, you can also try CitiFX and Divisa Capital FX (DCFX). With CitiFX, you are obviously trading with a bank using the SaxoTrader platform, but they also offer an Boston Technologies MT4 Bridge to their trade execution servers. With Divisa Capital, you are trading with a less well known Retail FX source, but a financial services company that obviously understands technology. So, you will be trading on Currenex platform that has been designed with the Currenex Hub in mind and that takes advantage of true STP to their liquidity pool. You will also note that with Divisa Capital FX, they do not hide the members of their liquidity pool. In fact, they openly publish them on their website. That's called credibility in the Retail FX business. Try getting a Bucket Shop to public announce the make-up of their proprietary liquidity pool.