I played with the demo a little bit (I love to try new 3d apps), and honestly, I found the interface a bit counter-intuitive. In my opinion, a good 3d app should be able to be navigated easily without instructions or tutorials on the first session. Only advanced or specialized modeling and animation features should require documentation to execute. Shade, for me, was not easy to operate on intuition alone.

Don't know if that's useful or not, but I'd honestly try playing with other 3d apps. trueSpace, by Caligari, is a good beginner (and moderate-advanced) application.