Need advice on how to learn Character Movement

Hello Peeps, (first post yay).

I have been watching a few video tutorials on Mechanim, Character Controllers, Animation Controllers, etc and seemed finding it very difficult to learn what I want to.

The scenario. I have a basic humanoid character with several pre-built animations that came with it. I opened a new project, created a plane and added the character in.

The actual issue. I want to learn how to create the scripts to actually move the character. For example, if I want to move forward, backwards, run, walk, etc. I want to bind the animations to the direction.

I looked at the Mechanim Unity tutorial but everything is pre-built - I feel I am not getting the knowledge I am looking for using this method. Most other tutorials are using the standard built-in controllers, etc.

I want to understand how I can make my character move about, execute attacks and bind all these to animations, as I am focused on learning iOS game dev, I also need to know to bind the actions to the actual touch controls.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, also, I know a little bit of C# so prefer tutorials in C#.

My apologies if I'm approaching the problem in the wrong way.