I've started the HTML and CSS course recently, and while HTML is understandable and nicely presented (in my opinion), CSS is absolutely confusing to me.

Most of the exercises seem like just rewriting the code given with no rhyme or reason, like "oh, this element looks bad, let's give it padding, margin, and text-align" (looked good to me anyway). And therefore none of it sticked, I'm at the tribute page project and I dread setting this stuff up, I still don't really know which property does what, and some of the steps in the tutorials are like "oh, you should have just used this command you've only seen once (or never) before".

Am I alone in this and doing something wrong? Or is the CSS part a bit lacking? If it's on me, how can I get the most out of it? Doing the previous project, I copied over some of the CSS stuff from previous exercises and simply gave it random values until it looked right, how do I make it so that I remember and know how to use this stuff?

Can anyone recommend some nice courses to supplement FCC CSS? Preferably free or cheap, I already found a page that shows visual reference for each of the properties, and it's pretty nifty